I’m wondering what’s worse for my website! I own a social networking website for bloggers sitting around 6000 members! All the bloggers they love do follow so right now this is what my links are! Is this affecting my website in a bad way for SEO with Goggle and if so how serious is it! I noticed my organic traffic dropped a lot over the last year! At one point I was getting 300 - 400 organic hits a day and now I’m seeing maybe 100 on average! Any suggestions?
Using dofollow links on your kind of website definitely does carry its risks. You would have a ton of backlinks to low quality websites. Some of those websites would even be spammy or in bad neighborhoods. All of those links reflect poorly upon your website. Those outgoing links also bleed some of your site's internal PR. So as you put more and more links on your site, the worse the situation gets. Your drop in traffic is not necessarily because of the dofollow links though. If you are not regularly building quality backlinks, it is quite normal to gradually lose rankings and traffic. You could try switching the outgoing links to nofollow, but this likely won't fix the traffic problem. It might help you gain some trust back from Google, but you wouldn't suddenly get rankings back. You should have Google Analytics or other analytic software installed so that you can pinpoint exactly where you are losing traffic from.
I have Google analytics installed and have had it installed for some time now! (one full year) What should I be looking at specifically to determine where the traffic stopped coming? FYI - I recently cleaned blogengage up we had so many dead links and they are now all removed and things are clean again!
The picture was not properly added. You should take a look at your traffic sources back when you had 300-400 hits a day. Then compare that to your traffic sources now. If traffic from certain search engines has dropped a lot, drill down deeper to see which keywords are sending you traffic then and now. When you check your rankings for those keywords you will see that you have likely dropped in rankings. The broken links that you removed might actually be worse than dofollow links to spammy sites. So hopefully that has a positive effect.
Yeah in total I removed over 1400 dead links to dead blogs! I will have a look at the SEO keywords and see what ranking dropped! Thanks for the advice!
/agree You either need to NOFOLLOW all outbound links from your blog commentors or moderate every post. If you end up linking out to a bad neighborhood because of some spammer posting a DOFOLLOW comment, your URL and/or site can be penalized. You never want a DOFOLLOW link to a site that you cannot 100% vouch for as a trustworthy site... ok... 99%.
Guys you will be happy to know I deleted so many links last night! All the upcoming pages have been deleted and all my good bloggers articles have been sent to the published side! I got rid of tons of poor quality links! Over 4000 poor quality links gone! I think for now or at least the next 2 or 3 page rank updates I will leave the community do follow and see how things fair out!