I'm posting on behalf of Rand who is currently busy at SES Chicago.
Prior to today if you wanted a link from SEOmoz all you had to do was sign up for an account, edit the URL field in your profile, and add a blog comment. We left this in place simply because we didn't care if the strength of our outbound links was diluted. Although SEO was high on our list of considerations when creating this site, it certainly wasn't the driving factor. We were more focused on delivering a killer site with great content. Rand informs me, however, that we've been suffering in the search engines due to a high number of outbound links to bad neighborhoods. So as of a few minutes ago all the links on your profile pages have been nofollowed.
Good news, however! The new SEOmoz is very close to being finished and we've got a system in place that will allow our active members to keep their profile links without a nofollow attribute. I won't go into too much detail right now, but if you regularly write comments on our site and are involved in our community your profile will allow you to have a link without a nofollow. This mechanism should effectively filter out spam and keep all the regulars happy.
No worries. You guys have a good setup though.
So basically you're applying a link condom until you check our health records? I promise I don't have anyting contagious. On the other hand I don't know about SearchStudent. I mean think about it. He's a drunken link whore that sticks his fingers in his mouth while linking to bad neighborhoods. Ewwwww.
Ahhh hahaha!! Too-Shay Mr. Temple, Too-Shay. Plus, after that SEO BoyBand fiasco, who knows what I've picked up.
Know what? I'm a link whore and I totally aint mad this. Then again, I didn't sign up here and get involved for the profile backlink. I gave Rand a little bottle of liquor for that one :-)
Anyways, you guys rock, keep it up. I think prolly the only people who get mad are the ones who signed up for the free link.
P.S. - I link out to "bad neighborhoods" all the time on purpose. Makes me feel kinda naughty. *sticks pinky finger in side of mouth*
Doubly surprised as I had never thought that any linkbacks would have been set as anything but nofollow.... I guess I never even thought about the profile page and not sure I've even looked at one-- my own included.
And perhaps more surprised that any would have been showing up in bad neighborhoods anyway. Maybe spammy comments have been yanked out before I see them, but always seems that the comments are fairly clean from a spammy point of view.
It's great that you are even coming up with a way to reward contributors at all, so certainly not going to lose sleep over losing something that I didn't know was there to begin with ;)
That's a great way to encourage people to comment. Excellent idea.
We were worried about a bit of backlash because of the SEOchat fiasco that happened about a year ago. I think that backlash was more due to the mass bannings that took place than the addition of a nofollow attribute, however.
Oh this is different. This is one link on a profile page, not tons of links created over the years by tons of members who really worked hard and contributed tons into building out that site.
Plus the guy was a dick about it.
The Good should not suffer because of the Bad unless the costs outweigh the benefits... I'm ALWAYS a little suspicious of absolutes. ;-)
For all those of you who are complaining (and not that your complaints aren't understable) isn't this what you would recommend to clients to optimize their sites? Isn't this what you would do for your site if it would have the right impact?
I guess I'm also interested (as several others have been) in an estimate of what impact this has had. Partly because I'm interested in that sort of thing, but also because it could add (or subtract!) weight from the argument that the benefit overall is worth being very slightly unfair to some of the Good who are inadvertently caught in the solution.
I read this blog daily, and if somebody has the same comment or question that I do, I don't chime in. For example, I have the same question as Solomon Rothman; How active do you have to be? I agree with EGOL; I'd like to hear a lot more about the effect of outgoing links and how it impacts SERPs. Yes, it might be "a great way to encourage people to comment", but what might start to happen happen is, people will make comments or ask redundant questions just to be considered "involved in our community"
I've added an updated blog entry on the subject here.
Of course adding nofollow tags is up to you as the blog owners. Some blogs use nofollow tags in profiles, some do not. I imagine you get more quality users by allowing naked links.
I am very curious as to the logic/research behind this statement:
we've been suffering in the search engines due to a high number of outbound links to bad neighborhoods.
Im sure blog members would benefit greatly from any stats used to generate this statement.
Sadly, cvos; it was not stats, but word-of-mouth that gave me the heads-up on this. Some folks in the other thread have mentioned some good tools to use to at least see who you're linking out to.
This is definitely a sticky issue and I'm glad you're upfront about why you're doing this.
As a blooger and a forum owner, I think followable links are the least I can do to reward the people who take the time to contribute ot my sites. I actually took the rel=nofollow out of my wordpress template (but then I'm only a PR 4 so who can be bothered to spam my site anyway!). On the forums we have an extension that takes out signatures on posts shorter than 100 words. This seems to have prevented a lot of the sig link spammers. Too bad they don't realize how poorly valued those links are anyway (better for reputation building on forums).
As a poster, it's nice to get something back for the contributions I make to a site. Not that I'm just in it for a linkback, but I do admit that I would contribute more to certain sites if there was something in it for me, just because of time constraints. I imagine for a lot of big bloggers, limiting the nubmer of comments is probably a blessing.
Edit: Fixing type-os
Megan, a PR 4 must not be anything to sneeze at... I'm looking at the Google PR bar right now for this thread and it's a 4! It sure beats my site's measely little 1.
Interesting that we are guilty until proven innocent.
But probably a storm in a Tea cup.
Is it less time consuming to regularly check contributors to see who is active and "approved" or is it better to try and monitor the bad neighbourhood links and then exclude as appropriate. Unless of course there is no easy way to identify the bad links then this action makes more sense.
Also makes me wonder how easy this would be to administer if you scaled upwards....say this site becomes 10 times more successful. Thats an awful lot of contributors to monitor.
Seriously ..can you "out" the bad links...let us all see them even if they have the condom applied. Lets see what we are dealing with.
How bad can they be? This is a big site to hurt like this. Do you need to be as big as wikipedia before these bad links don't hurt?
I agree. Good policy.
Can't say it's a biggie, and I've seen comments before about SEOmoz being comment spammed so makes sense.
Really,
I could have sworn they where always nofollowed. I have my browser setup to highlight all links with nofollow and I always thought they where that way. Guess I was mistaken.
All links in blog comments are but profile page links are not. It's funny because we always get spammers who post blog comments with links in them, which are nofollowed and then subsequently deleted and banned. To avoid this all the spammer would have to do is put a link in their profile and then contribute a non-spam comment to any blog entry and they'd have a link.
Being honest, I'm kinda surprised you guys haven't done this before... But it's sad you have to do it at all.
How much are the rankings dropping. I am curious to see if some of my projects I should not link to for the same reason, or at least add he nofollow tag. This is kind of disappointing because some of the sites I am trying to get ranked/indexed I link from my site as a quick fix basically. I am interested in how many outbound domains that aren't very decent will drop your rankings, or if it only applies to domains that are spammy (so still can be a pr0, just not a well ranked one).
"place that will allow our active members to keep their profile links without a nofollow attribute"
Ah yes, and no comment. :)
Obviously, a link form a SEOmoz profile page isn't the biggest deal in the world, but is there enough spam profiles on SEOmoz that it warrants such a change? I guess it might, but I guess that means that SEOmoz is doing something right.
How can you find out if you're suffering from too many outbounds to bad neighbourhoods?
I have the same question :)
He's at SES right now, maybe Matt Cutts looked up in his super duper PR tool and told him so :)
I thought Matt was skipping out on SES Chicago. Can't seem to find the link where he said that tho.
I would imagine you simply ook at your list of outbound links and consider many of them - are they to spammy casino and porn sites? Probably... If this is the case, you can only assume you are gonna suffer for this... How much? That is up to the algorithms and you don't really know...
I would be curious to understand the logic you are using to make these determinations.
It's good to see programming types thinking beyond the black and white answers.
Sounds more than good! Seomoz is webb 2.0!
I just love it, really, really love it :)
I wish someone would write me a WordPress plugin to do something along the same lines: reward your active contributors by having the links in their comments be normal links, and all other links nofollow links...
This is such a great way to encourage people to actively participate...
Just out of interest do you have any graphs or stats to show search engine referrals against outbound links (or even better OBLs to 'bad neighbourhoods')?
Would be interesting to see just how much of a difference it has made, and when it really started to affect te site.
I can't imagine many of the regular commentors / contributors here would be that fussed about links being nofollows, but great to see you're encouraging a sense of quality community!
Joost - Great idea for a WP plugin!
nice =)
Rand, dude... Don't you remember SEOchat anymore?
j/k ;)
Cough, hahaha.
Meh, it's your blog, I would do the same, no frowns here.
ROFLMAO! Was thinking the exact same thing!
my tought's precisely ;)
No more link love for contributors/authors either - tsk-tsk...Damn... now I got to start building link baits to get rand mention me with his posts ;)
That's a great idea, Joost.
Thx, i'll try to find someone to build it for me :)
I appreciate the "heads up" on this. I'd like to hear a lot more about the effect of outgoing links and how it impacts SERPs.
https://www.seomoz.org/profile.php?user_id=144...
This is not really helpful for those whose profiles have a reasonable Google PageRank
The NOFollow could Nix the pagerank on the next update
which means all that hard work went for nothing
The Good should NEVER suffer because of the Bad!
Bad move. Selfish. Not based on thorough considerations. Top down decision.
You should have at least waited until you install the ne system that promotes power users. You gained several links due to having me as your commenter (as I linked to you often) and besides valuable content in the comments. I just got a link. Now you take that away. Do you know what this tells me? You don't care about your community. Indeed your community is more an annoyance to you than a community. Close the comments and nobody will "spam" you ever again.
Btw. don't link every two weeks to text link sellers and you won't end up in a bad neighbourhood.
I know why I'm at SEO Refugee. Because SEOs making profit out of you seemingly always end up screwing you. This is not Web 2.0.
You should change your domain name, I think overreact.com suits you better
LMFAO!
OnReact, it isn't a bad move. If your site was not getting ranked as well and / or was at risk of being penalized because it is linked to animal-porn-bonanza.tz and a few thousand splogs about insurance or pills or whatever, you would do the same thing.
If you are involved here for more than a single backlink, you'll be fine. If you are not here to actually contribute, you can go comment on some old 1997 guestbooks and get a free backlink that way.
This is not the same as the SEOchat fiasco. They do care about you getting some link love, but not if you are a mooch. It is for their protection. Power users will be rewarded, non contributors don't deserve to be.
One other thing - your comment seems to indicate that you've given us so much by linking to us but the only thing we've given in return is a link from your profile page.
What about the blog entries we write and the vast community we offer? What about the free articles? The free SEO tools? If a free link is the only thing you're getting out of our site, perhaps you need to dig a bit deeper.
How active do you have to be? I read this blog, among ten other ones, but only have time to comment occationally, but I have a good quality blog which offers SEO insight.
Diluted outbound links? I hope this is a one-time indescretion on my favorite SEO blog.