Is it bad for seo to have a large number of external links opening in modal windows?

[simmo235]

I've got a job board that pulls in feeds from various job sites and recruiters. Rather than losing visitors exiting my site, I thought I was being clever by opening all external links in modal windows, so the user can 'click to close' and effectively stay on my site.

I'm now starting to think this may potentially have been a bad move for SEO. Is there any evidence to suggest this?

Simon

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Simon,

I have seen a very similar issue with another site I have been working on, and by no-following the links to the external sites, this cured the problem. These just opened in a new browser window, rather than being modal.

It is the same as just no-following links so you aren't seen as either an affiliate or selling links and passing page rank.

-Andy

[JaneCopland]

Hi Simon,

Like Andy says, is there a possibility that you can have these windows open in a new tab with a nofollow attribute if necessary? Whether to keep people on site or send them away has been a problem / debate in marketing for a long time (well before we had to worry about penalisation / outbound link issues to go with it). There's a fine line between keeping people on a site they no longer want to be on and accidentally allowing them to forget about where they were before.

You might want to test different ways of sending visitors away to see which results in the best conversion metrics (whatever you choose those metrics to be). As a user, I almost invariably open links in new tabs myself, but different people have different ways of handling this themselves and I'd test what works best for your user base in terms of visitor retention / other goals.