Best Practice - Linking out to client websites in niche industry

[JanetJ]

I have a client in a niche building industry that provides 4 different services to them. She has provided me with a list of 131 past clients of hers that she wants hyperlinked on her site to theirs. The logic is that a lot of these clients are heavy hitters and quite impressive to their peers so the links will be reinforcing my client's value.

Is there a best practice for determining whether the link should be follow/no follow? Should I be checking the client's site's spam score, page rank, anything else? Some of these 131 links will be duplicated due to the client performing more than one service for them.

[JordanLowry]

I would recommend checking their page rank and spam score for starters. However, whatever links are duplicated I would no follow them.

Are these clients going in a portfolio section of your client's site? I would just consider the user experience and think about building content around each client with a link and a description of services rendered so it isn't just a bunch of links.

[MrLeeB]

Hey Janet,

Like Jordan says, putting a bit of content around each to provide a bit of background info about each service would be good, rather than just a list of links to other companies.

About the follow / nofollow issue, as long as the sites aren't spammy, there shouldn't be a need to nofollow them. I've heard it reinforced several times recently that as long as you trust the website you're linking to, there's no need to nofollow the link. Adding a nofollow to the link is like saying to search engines, 'I don't trust this guy' - but if you didn't, why would you link to them?

Anyway sorry for the rambling but where the links are duplicated, nofollow, otherwise there's no need.