Nofollow Outbound Links on Listings from Travel Sites?

[Your_Workshop]

We oversee a variety of regional, county, and town level tourism websites, each with hundreds (or even thousands) of places/businesses represented with individual pages. Each page contains a link back to the place's main web presence if available. My fear is that a large portion of these linked to sites are low quality, and may even be spammy. With our budgets there is no way to sort through them and assign nofollows as needed. There are also a number of broken links that we try to stay on top of but at times some slip through due to the sheer number of pages.

I am thinking about adding a nofollow to these outbound links across the board. This would not be all outbound links on the website, just the website links on the listing pages.

I would love to know peoples thoughts on this.

[gazzerman1]

Question is do your customers pay to be listed with you? If so are they using you for the dofollow links? If this is the case then you may lose some of your business by changing it to nofollow.

If they are paying there is also a risk of a Google penalty for paid do follow links.

If you are unable to maintain quality and there is no good reason to have a dofollow, then switch to nofollow.

Are the pages hardcoded? Or is all the data in a database? If it is in a database it would take no time at all to run each domain through a loop and check what response status code you get.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
This would be a very quick way to find broken links. You may even be able to purchase an api on something like majestic or Moz and run the sites through that as well for a better indication of site quality. If the site has very low DA or Trust Flow, you could also make it nofollow or remove etc...

If it is all hardcoded then that would be very hard work all around.

[Your_Workshop]

Partners, for the most part, do not pay to be listed. Those that do are in it for promotional benefits such as being listed first and other advertising perks such as email promotion. Links are never brought into the conversation.

Most of the listings we maintain are in databases and we have an internal team of developers (who built the sites in question) and some back-end tools in our CMS that help us identify the 404s. Lack of updating them is a combination of small digital marketing budgets and client staffing, lack of client assistance identifying where the links should go and political issues where some of the clients do not want us to manage their listings for various reasons. Essentially our hands are tied when it comes to updating listings (though we know that this would have the largest benefit).

Overall it is the number of lower quality websites that we need to link to to ensure that everyone in the region is represented equally. It really comes down to is if I nofollow all of them will it result in a positive impact? Will it have no effect? Or will it perceived as negative since I am essentially nofollowing hundreds or thousands of links on each of these sites?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Good question.

On one hand, I'm a fan of linking out with, link equity. There's a good correlation with linking out and higher rankings (though I don't believe we've ever studied the difference between followed and nofollowed in this regard) I hate to see links "nofollowed" simply to protect against Google actions, but it is a reality of doing business.

To me, it comes down to how many of the sites are actual spam. "Low quality" is certainly different than spam. If it's a handful of sites out of thousands, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Generally, tourism websites are a much more trustworthy quality than sites in the gambling/adult/pharmaceutical verticals.

Now, on the other hand, if you do choose to nofollow the links, you probably won't see too many negative consequences.

In the end, I think you have to guage how bad the sites are that you're linking to, and make your judgement from there.

[Your_Workshop]

Thanks, Cyrus. You have confirmed what my gut was thinking, that it likely wouldn't have much of an impact either way. The idea of testing this has been on my mind for about a year but couldn't get a strong feeling one way or the other. I would imagine that there are very few spammy sites that we are linking to but will try and dig through as time allows. Your spam score tool should help. If needed I will just nofollow specific sites that I believe may fall into this category.

Appreciate your time!

[Mark-Tillison]

Cyrus, I was actually looking to answer the statement you mentioned, "though I don't believe we've ever studied the difference between followed and nofollowed in this regard".

We've a really popular post on our site which lists hundreds of Twitter chat hours and links to the Twitter hashtag and the host in each case (http://tillison.co.uk/blog/complete-twitter-chat-hours-directory/).

Across the team, we're disagreeing whether all external links in the post should be nofollow or whether they should remain untagged and therefore dofollow. On the one hand, it feels like we're leaking page equity through every link and want to retain it, of course. On the other, nofollow kinda feels like we trust none of those links and that the page may be less valuable to the Googlebot.

I'm working through the links making them all nofollow, but would be really interested in your perspective on it.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It's an interesting perspective. Looking at the pages+links, they all look trustworthy and normally I wouldn't see a reason to nofollow them, especially since they are all editorially controlled by you and your team.

Linking equity is a concern, but I honestly doubt you're saving anything by making them nofollow, especially since Google updated how they handle PageRank sculpting back in 2009.

Not that there aren't legitimate ways to preserve and flow link equity (such as including internal links withing the main body of text instead of sidebar areas/navigation) but in this case I think leaving the links follow won't hurt at all.

[Mark-Tillison]

Thanks Cyrus

If external links are a ranking signal, do you think there would be a difference in perceived value whether external links are noFollow or doFollow, or do we expect that to make little difference?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.