backpage.com Adds Nofollow To Outbound Ad Links

Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on January 21, 2010

Bye, Bye, backpage.com. I just noticed Backpage has recently implemented rel=”nofollow” on all free outbound ad links. I’m not sure when this went into place, but I couldn’t find any other resources acknowledging it yet.

While I do believe this will help the quality of their free classifieds, I don’t know of anyone other than myself that has actually ever used their website to buy something or find a service provider. Unfortunately, the majority of value was in their ad links. With that said, it is quite possible Google manually stopped allowing them to pass outbound link-juice a long time ago anyway. Tough to tell though, any link-juice that might have been passed before was minimal already.

You have to wonder if they were given the infamous Google ultimatum.

Now that Backpage no longer helps with link-building for SEO, I’ll be interested to see what happens with their traffic over the next few months.

Does anyone know on what day they actually implemented the nofollow tag on user-generated outbound links?

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