Do you think too many (nofollow) outbound links is a problem?

[ViperChill]

Just received my first crawl report from SEOmoz for my blog.

I've rreceived a number of warnings / errors about having too many outbound links on my pages. These are simply comments from people (some pages have 300+) and the links are nofollowed.

It seems like you guys must have a reason why this warning is in place, so I would love your theories...

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, it's always pretty tough to gauge these things without a link but it does seem a bit unusual for so many comments to include an outbound link. That said, I would say google is a bit more savvy at detecting areas of UGC and spotting the link condom used here but still, it seems a bit funny, like an unmoderated comment feed which could be an indication of low content.

The point of nofollow is to say that you don't trust the author or the destination of the link, so, to have 300 nofollowed links in UGC seems a little fishy.

As ever, it maybe perfectly right in this case, and I believe that for this to be a problem it would need to be combined with other signals before they would take action.

Out of interest, can you give some indication of why there are so many outbound links? Is it across all articles or just one or two where you have asked for links or some such?

Hard to give much better help or opinion without context.

Cheers
Marcus

[ViperChill]

Hey Marcus,

I run a popular marketing blog, ViperChill, and get hundreds of comments on every single post.

When people comment, they link back to their site with their name (just like regular comments).

[Marcus_Miller]

Ahh, so they are not dropping a comment as such, it is just the usual linkback from the posters name like in a wordpress blog?

I would not sweat that at all. The search engines know what a comment is and understand that is not a link as such.

The moz tools are great, as an indication things like this, but in this instance, the warning is a bit of a red herring so don't sweat it.

Marcus

[ViperChill]

That's what I thought. Was curious to see "The Moz" view on things

[RyanKent]

The warning for too many nofollowed links is there because these links affect your SEO.

Your page offers SEO benefits to your site. If you create a "hello world" page, that page will inherit some value from being part of your domain. It will receive further value from links to the page, social sharing of the page (tweets, etc) and so forth.

The value of the page can be passed along to other pages, both inside and outside of your site, through links. The nofollowed links devalue any followed links on your page. If you want to use your blog to pass more juice to other pages within your site, I would recommend a comment tool that not only tags the links with "nofollow" but instead breaks the links so they appear as text, not links.

To answer your question directly, YES, I think too many nofollow outbound links are a problem that should be fixed. If you don't believe these pages offer value to your site, you can ignore the warning. I think doing such is a missed opportunity.