Should we rel=nofollow these links ?

[jfmonfette]

On our website, we have a section of free to low-cost tools that could help small business increase their productivity without spending big bucks. For example, this is the page for online collaboration tools: http://www.bdc.ca/EN/solutions/smart_tech/tech_advice/free_low_cost_applications/Pages/online_collaboration_tools.aspx

None of the company pay anything to be on these list. We actually do quite a lot of research to chose which should be listed there and which should not.

Recently, one of the company in our lists asked us to add rel=nofollow to the link to their website because they add been targeted by a manual action on Google and want their link profile to be as clean as possible (probably too clean).

My question is : Should we add rel=nofollow to all these links ?

Thanks,

Jean-François Monfette

[tdawson09]

Sure. First off, you've been asked by the linking company to do so, so you want to accommodate their request, and secondly, it will do you no harm.

[jfmonfette]

Thanks, but what about the other links. Is it good practice to nofollow external links? Does it count as link juice sculpting, which is also frowned upon by Google ?

[billhartzer]

Jean-Francois,

If you want to accommodate the company asking for the link to be a 'nofollow' link, then that's fine. I would nofollow their link. If you have more than 50 links on the page, though, I would consider whether or not you need that page on the site at all or need to split it into several pages.

Linking out to appropriate on-topic sites will generally not hurt your site's rankings. But, keep in mind that you need to police those links to make sure that you're not linking out to any malicious sites.

[jfmonfette]

Thanks Bill for you reply.

We have people actually doing research to make sure we're only presenting pertinent suggestions to entrepreneurs and no malicious sites.

Regards,