: What needs to be done to user generated outbound links to prevent hurting SEO? I have a site that contains user/external application generated content (content from SMS messages). I want links

@Bryan171

If you want Google to index these SMS messages, definitely use rel="nofollow" on all links. If you don't, not only are you going to be passing all of your link juice to those links, you're also going to get penalized hard whenever those links are linking out to sites that are spammy, low or bad content, or malware.

If you're posting people's SMS messages onto your website and are trying to rank those messages with Google, please make sure that your users know that their messages are going to be made public on Google. It would be unethical for you to publicly display private messages online. At the same time, if your users know that their SMS messages are being made public, then that is a great tool that you're offering. An easy way for people to publish their original content.

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@Jamie184

According to google's recommendation : any link on your site for which you don't care about indexing/ranking or you don't have to help its search ranking you should add no follow.
Example : All paid links on your site should be no follow as having them without no follow gives a false indication to search engines about them being relevant to the page. There are other use cases as well where no index is a must.
But adding no index does not help your seo ranking in any way, its just a standard practice that needs to be followed in order to help search engines define relevant content and create good reputation around your site.

P.S
Adding user generated content generally helps in enriching the SEO of your page if the content is relevant to the page topic else it might hurt as well.
Example if a page is about Apple and user generated content is talking about Mango, this page would not rank well for search queries related to apple due to low keyword density for actually targeted keywords set. So if your user generated content does not match your page topic/quality you should prevent submitting that to search engines.

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@Bryan171

Nobody could even imagine, for what topic could rank a page with content from user SMS messages.

But one thing is for sure - such content will never ever help somebody to solve any issue. Don't make a mistake to think, just because it is a content it should be indexed.

Set the whole page with SMS messages to noindex and all in- and outbound links to nofollow. Google doesn't excuse useless content in index.

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