Although Matt filled in for me yesterday to author a quick piece, I thought I'd expand on this topic before flying home to Seattle, as it's raised the ire of several folks hoping for a more thorough explanation. It's also an excellent time to talk about how bad outbound links can affect your website.
At SEOmoz, we've got 10K+ members with profiles, and a visible amount of those were linking to some naughty places (at least, enough to have it mentioned to me in person). Not just spam, but places that none of us who contribute here (or work here) would want to be associated with. The grapevine source basically said - unless you want all links at SEOmoz to lose their value (including those in the blog, on the recommended list, in articles, etc.), you should take care with who you link out to.
The new system will allow folks who contribute to still have those outbound links that pass value (and get lots of clicks - we see the profile page as a whole being on of the most popular pages on the site, so lots of real users are clicking on them). We'll manually approve the folks who get moved into the "contributed a bunch of good stuff" pile so as to prevent linking out to nasty neighborhoods and email you if we have a concern.
This means that a few bad apples won't spoil it for the rest of us. Also - if you've already contributed in the comments quite a bit, we'll be giving credit for those comments in the new system. Matt's working on converting all those comments into points right now.
I'm so sorry that this had to happen, but I also feel that it would have been a bigger loss for SEOmoz to exclude "nofollow" but stop passing any kind of link value. Hopefully, even those folks who disagree with this decision can see my perspective.
So what are the negatives to having bad outbound links on your website:
- You might be perceived as part of a spam/link network and get penalized or banned
- Your outbound links might have their value cut off if you link to too many bad neighborhoods (or even just a few if you're a smaller site)
- Your site's overall authority or quality might be perceived as lower than you'd expect, causing crawling, indexing or ranking to suffer
At SEOmoz, I hoped that we'd never have to worry, because folks who commented wouldn't want to leave links to negative sites (since members would click them to see who was commenting), but that didn't always turn out to be the case. Even sadder is that I suspect (though I haven't crawled through the profile outbounds by hand), that only a few profile creators probably made for most of the problem.
Thanks to everyone for understanding my position - I know it's frustrating, but we'll do the best we can to reward those who contribute and provide value with our links.
So it looks like you need 100 SEOmoz points to get rid of the nofollow. That should be fine, and with the thumbs up/down ability you can stop people just spamming comments.
In the face
Rand, I think you guys are completely justified in doing this. The point of participating in the SEOMOz blog shouldn't be to get link juice to one's own site(s). It should be to contribute opinions and learn from others' contributed opinions on SEO (mostly the latter for me!). Anyone who is just trying to slurp some linkjuice does so selfishly and against the spririt of community that SEOMoz has built.
Of course, one could specify in the FAQs that there should be no linking to porno or illegal activities etc
Or one could allow links on profiles AFTER a certain number of quality comments.
But, what is a so-called 'Bad Neighborhood' - why should anyone be forced to HIDE FROM the elements of LIFE or the COMPLETE HUMAN EXPERIENCE. Everything is apart of the World's Reality and the Human Experience. The experience of LIFE of Being Alive.
With the exception of illegal Activities and Possibly SOME types of Porn - no one really has the right to judge what is a so called Bad Link - and this type of arrogance by Google or MSN is inherently wrong - and is fundamentally harmful to the very essence of the WEB.
It could make Webmasters quite paranoid and erring on the side of extreme caution.
With the exception of illegal Activities and Possibly SOME types of Porn - no one really has the right to judge what is a so called Bad Link - and this type of arrogance by Google or MSN is inherently wrong - and is fundamentally harmful to the very essence of the WEB.
I tend to disagree - if the link is irrelevant, the destination site is spammy, or any one of a hundred other things, it's a perfectly justified decision by the engines. Otherwise all results would be ruled by junk, spammy sites....
Firstly, I think that this link: https://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/seomoz/~3/5716... is no longer the most commented thread. It even got to de-lurk after 6 months ;-)
It is a testament to what a great thing the seomoz team have put together that such a long discussion about this change is taking place.
Seriously - this is like the kind of discussion usually reservered for forums full of zealots. You guys have managed to create a genuine community around what people would otherwise call "just a blog"
Its really rare/cool to have a potentially negative change received with such enthusiasm because so many people also want to protect the seomoz website - and hence your company by association.
hope that wasn't too much of a rant...
People just don't like unexpected changes (whether they hurt or not) but the fact that you've explained the situation, have a plan in place to minimize any "damage" to your contributors and have even been posting on other sites to explain what's going on should convince people that you're acting responsibly.
If only other sites had done the same, I wouldn't have found myself trying to help run an SEO forum (and I didn't even know what SEO stood for when I got started - not that I know much more now).
One thing I really like about SEOmoz is that the blog posts are knowledgeable and most of the comments are good as well, thus adding to the overall integrity of the article. The profile page links should have been nofollow'd from the beginning, but now I just worry that some people will post often just to post and try to get to that "followed link" status.
If a link from SEOmoz is that big of a part of your link building strategy then there is a problem. Discussions should be about linking to bad neighborhoods here and not so much about how to get that link back or why it is now being nofollow'd.
Sorry for the rant. :)
Tac - Agreed, the full link from SEOmoz should rather be thought of as a way that we can give back to the people who give us and our community so much, rather than an actual link building tactic. I can't imagine someone putting in all that time just for a link back on a profile page.
I agree completely. I actually wanted to say this in my original post but didn't want to offend anyone. If adding nofollow to a link from SEOmoz impacts your SEO strategy enough to cause upset, you might want to seriously rethink what you're doing.
The only weakness Rand was that you allowed people to edit their link so they could change it to rank new sites. Believe me, when you are a newbie you do all you can to be found (short of begging for links) and we all have been there right? ;o)
How large do you think a blog has to be for this issues to negativley impact the power of all it's outbound links? Do you think a small blog with say 4 comments to bad neighborhoods would be effected?
On our blog, we decided not to add the nofollow attribute to links added. Why? We want to encourage participation and discussion. Perhaps it's not apparent to many of our commenters, but if they are willing to take the time to engage with us, we think they should be getting some Google Juice in return.
The system currently implicitly assumes that a poster would "thumbs up" their own post. So the current system encourages lots of "acceptable quality" posting (i.e. posting that isn't complete spam and doesn't immediately get 4 thumbs down. By giving 0 credits for an own post, until it gets rated positively or negatively would encourage higher quality comments, but would not encourage posts at all. However, if the thinking is really that commentors need to be encouraged to post comments, then my faith in society will take a rather large knock!
Measurement and incentivisation has been shown to have a sometimes unexpectedly large impact as those affected adjust their behaviour to maximise rewards. I'm an intermittent poster, but it seems that there have been no serious changes for the worse since the introduction of this system. Faith in humanity restored, although I am curious to know whether the average quality of comments changes over time, and what impact different point systems would have on this.
I believe it was a great decision back then Rand. And i still believe that all of the hugely populated blogs should use this technique :)
Hi Rand,
With all those spammers out there and SEO's that try dangerous stuff; Why should you trust the nofollow link condom? https://www.vdgraaf.info/nofollow-is-a-leaky-condom.html
Hey Rand, interesting move.
I wonder how a *FEW* links in a *FEW* profiles of your 10k can already raise eyebrowes of Matt Cutts & Co.
I assume it must be a bigger scale issue for them or just a very good time/place to talk NOFOLLOW again...
But anyway - a smart suggestion, the implementation Matt suggests it is cool and I wish Drupal would have an implementation for that,too :-)
best, christoph
Thanks for the update instead of just suddenly adding the tags. Just shows how you truly care for your readers.
I am a little wary of trusting that a "nofollow" will solve any problems with links after my recent little test.
However, I figure that your "grapevine source" knows quite a bit more than me about this kind of thing.
mbarr - Adam Lasnik & Tim Converse both said on a panel today at SES Chicago that they don't "obey" the no following part of nofollow. Both agreed that a more accurate name woudl actually be "nolinkjuice" - it doesn't give anchor text benefit or link pop benefit. They still get crawled as a discovery method.
At the end of the day, it's your site Rand and you do what you have to to make it work as a business. There's no way that anyone can seriously argue with this decision.
Will this get me some extra points?!
The big question IMHO is what treshold did SeoMoz recently pass in order to get such a "non-official" warning? If there are 10k+ member profiles, how many of them point to bad neighborhoods (and how many are even indexed)? I usually check user's profiles that comment to posts I've written (as well as users who post frequently), and based on this I'd say the number of "direct bad neighborhood" links is on the low end. If this is anywhere to be generalized, I just have to wonder the accuracy of the warning you received....
What search engines seem to see is really small set of 10k member profile pages: site:seomoz.org Member profile in Google with 1500 results, about 700 contain URL/link.
site:seomoz.org Member profile in Yahoo with 2000 results, about 800 contain URL/link.
Also what wonders me is - are they counting bad neighborhood link count or bad neighborhood link value? If algo for "link juice flow" hasn't changed drasticly, people who post one or two comments have very low value profile pages, while users who post frequently (like me) have profile pages with much power.
Thus if the warning is justified, either some heavy-weight posters link/are related to bad neighborhoods, or they are simply counting total number of direct and indirect relations to bad neighborhoods despite "link juice" of pages contained by linking pages.
Also I wouldn't exclude other possibilities that could link moz to bad neighborhoods. For example moz content/feeds are used in several sites I would consider to be of very low value /spammy.
I am going to agree with everyone that has said it is a smart decision. People that really deserve the links should get it, which are the people actually getting involved, not people plugging questionable sites.
I never really understood why people get so upset when nofollows where added to community sites (ie SEOChat). If your there for the link juice, your there for the wrong reasons anyway. Forums and Comment sigs get "traffic".
I know, actually linking for traffic is so 1990's... :D
Rand, what you're doing looks like a great solution. Nice!
Mind if I drop the link to the forward link tool Michael referenced for We Build Pages (me)? https://www.webuildpages.com/forwardlinks/ This shows any errors in who you're linking out to. We also just updated it yesterday to show if you're linking out to someone who is linking back to you (recip links). It takes maybe 5 minutes to finish, but gives a nice picture.
Funny thing after getting rid of nofollow the link spam increased dramatically. I'm not really sure what I want to do to address the problem.
Everybody should use the MSN linkfromdomain: command once in a while. If you don't like the site, don't link to it.
https://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=LinkFrom...
Hi Five!
I never saw that command before, I feel like a rookie SEO!
Or, better yet, just check all of your LinkFromDomain sites to determine whether or not they have been banned...
Banned Sites Tool
Good solution Rand, I don't think anyone can legitimately take issue with it. Without outing anyone I'd be curious to see the percentage of abusers to normal members. In this era of user generated content this issue of sites linking to bad neighborhoods is only going to grow.
I would imagine at some point the SEs are going to have to develop a system to monitor percentages of "bad" links to overall links as well as monitor number of "bad" user to overall users. Below a certain threshold the site won't be impacted, above they would discount all links. Without such a system the growth in UGC will lead to a shrinking link base for SEs to work from as more and more sites try to add a community element.
It's all good - you have to protect your property...
I would be interested to see the breakdown at some point. I mean, how many of the commenters here earn enough 'quality points' to get the non-nofollowed profile links, and what percentage fall into the 'spam/bad neighbourhood'...
Kicking off the boots and wading into this one...
To me this is a sensible decision. Totally understand it and can relate. But it's also indicative of something larger (and probably more important). Probably 99% of the webmasters out there don't know 100% how search engines view their site. Okay, that's confusing... what I mean is SEOmoz probably never would have known this if it wasn't for the relationships you have w/ certain SE reps, correct? Or if that's not the case then other well connected SEOs who found out 'through the grapevine.'
That's very powerful and the most important lesson here, to me at least. It really is all about partnerships, in one way or another.
Hi Rand.
I guess you should do whatever you can to protect the ranking/reputation of your website. I'm just interested in knowing, how much deeper the linking analysis go? I mean, if I link to A, A links to B, B links to C, C links to D,...so on and then Y links to Z and Z eventually links to some porn website -- do I get penalized for that?
Sounds very sensable, Rand. I have a weird feeling that we're in for a big shake-out after new years ... The sad part is that those who are aware of the nofollow and all are the ones who are going to be "stingy" about handing out links, cutting even more new webmasters out of the value-chain. But how can we avoid that?
There's a difference in the way you handle it and how the other forum handled it. I bet it wasn't an easy decision for you all. Kudos, Rand, well done.
Don't get scared but comments are ranked as content in search engines. As I wrote recently in a post from my blog:
So cleaning up your outbounds is smart marketing rand and keeping your conversation on topic -- even smarter!
And yes, I will quote myself because nobody else seems to be doing so currently. :)
Rand, can you give us some idea of the areas the links went to? Pornography and gambling would be obvious, but what about links to sites that looked ok but they themselves were linking out to bad neighbourhoods?
Sadly, I haven't looked at them yet. I'll probably try to dig through the MySQL database at some point in the near future to figure out what might have been responsible, but in there's a good chance that unless it's very obvious, I might not be able to even spot them.
I think it's a good move Rand. It's a shame some innocent people will get caught in the cross fire, but such is life, they'll get over it. Those not willing to really contribute and add to the quality can find free links elsewhere.
wonder who the grapevine source was :)
On the plus side, its a great way to motivate users to comment, that way they sort of 'earn' their outbound link which seems fair to me, plus we all benefit from the contributions.
It all works for me. I don't want this site to go 'down' SE-wise - it's too valuable.
I would be interested in the breakdown of the crud that you mention.
Rand, if you are tweaking things so decent contributors get the nofollow removed, would that include removing the nofollow from the comments themselves as well as the profile?
Frak - the comments themselves have always been "nofollowed" - when you try to add a comment, notice that the comment box says so.
I'm going to go ahead and disagree with this move, not because I actually disagree, but because I want to stir up some controversy. I heard that controversy is the way to get attention in the SEO world now, so here goes:
DAMN YOU SEOmoz AND THE NOFOLLOW ATTRIBUTE YOU RODE IN ON!