Rel="no follow" for All Links on a Site that Charges for Advertising

[zazo]

If I run a site that charges other companies for listing their products, running banner advertisements, white paper downloads, etc. does it make sense to "no follow" all of their links on my site?

For example: they receive a profile page, product pages and are allowed to post press releases.  Should all of their links on these pages be "no follow"?

It seems like a gray area to me because the explicit advertisements will definitely be "no followed" and they are not buying links, but buying exposure.

However, I still don't know the common practice for links from other parts of their "package".

Thanks

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Follow links you have to approve. If people can sign up and get followed links without any editorial review, you will be spammed sooner or later.

G recommends you nofollow all user submitted links (to be on the safe side).

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

[zazo]

Oleg- Thanks for the answer.  I should be more clear with the question.  All user submitted links will be set at "no follow".  I was interested in what to do about company profile pages, product pages and press releases which we will enter and/or approve.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Just don't approve porn, illegal, and spam filled website urls. If a company's website is deemed acceptable to be placed on your website, I see nothing wrong with giving them dofollow links.

[Intergen]

No follow keeps the link juice on your site. Do follow passes it to their site.  It all depends.  Do you want to pass page rank authority to their site?  Some find that appealing and will get ad space just for that reason alone.  Others won't care as they will just be looking for a good solid site to get the word out.

So if you site has great traffic and is providing value for someone in their niche market I say go with no follow as your site will do better in the rankings by keeping the page authority within your site.

[zazo]

Thanks Mark, what I'm trying to get people's opinion on is whether it would be considered people "paying for links" if I give them followed links on my site that are not explicitly paid for (i.e. not in their advertisements).

Most companies I have done advertising with in the past have allowed follow links in profiles, press releases, etc. , but I've also encountered those that no follow everything and told me they were doing it to protect themselves from getting penalized by Google.

I wonder if they were scared of being penalized, or just wanted to sculpt PR and keep it all on their site?

[Intergen]

In that I case I would guess that they are PR sculpting as Google would not be able to discern if they are passing links through a paid service.

Also, if the site is relevant to a specific niche and not just a link farm I would further believe that Google would not penalize the site.

Its kind of like SEOMoz - after a certain amount of points you get a do follow on one of your links.  I don't think Google would be able to discern if SEOmoz was asking for people to pay or not.

[zazo]

I did not know that about SEOmoz.  I guess I need to work on getting more points!

[Intergen]

Right?! When you hit 200 Moz points you get a do follow - rock it Anthony!

[TerabitJoe]

Hello all,

Thanks for the input. I'm on the marketing side with a site that presents our products. I'm tryign to clean up inbound links.

I pulled the Inbound links report from Moz.com and have concluded that I want to focus on the sites that are NOT listed as "no_follow." Troouble I'm having is the report headers:

<colgroup><col width="90"><col width="115"><col width="143"><col width="95"><col width="37"></colgroup>
| Link Equity | No Link Equity | Only rel=nofollow | Only follow | 301 |
| Yes | No | No | Yes | No |

Does a 'Yes' value in the 'Only rel=nofollow' column mean that the link is marked as nofollow? As in "Affirmative, this link is marekd as nofollow, yes."

Then there is the 'Only follow' and other headers. Know where I can find a Moz article explaining these?

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Regards,

Joe