28 replies to this topic

[ditoweb]

nofollow =| no trust.

it just means "don't follow the link" to a web crawler. for link-juice purposes, it means don't pass on the link juice.

i don't think any websites should link to a site they don't trust. why would you do that sans advertising? (in which case nofollow is required)

[projectphp]

Forum comments, flickr, youtube, blog comments the list goes on.

[Jill]

it just means "don't follow the link" to a web crawler. for link-juice purposes, it means don't pass on the link juice.

But why would anyone not want to pass the juice to their corporate site? Seems nuts to me, personally.

[ditoweb]

But why would anyone not want to pass the juice to their corporate site? Seems nuts to me, personally.

You can't see the value in passing the link-juice on a given page to only the pages you wish to share the juice with? What if you don't care if your "Contact" page ranks high in the SERPS? Why not just nofollow your internal links and pass the juice onto the important pages on your site?

[incrediblehelp]

Websites do this all of the time. Look at cNET in the footer. I have seen smaller mom and pop websites get in trouble when doing this on Yahoo. Not sure why Yahoo has a such a problem with it.

[amabaie]

You can't see the value in passing the link-juice on a given page to only the pages you wish to share the juice with? What if you don't care if your "Contact" page ranks high in the SERPS? Why not just NoFollow your internal links and pass the juice onto the important pages on your site?

The search engines did not create NoFollow to help us better manipulate the link juice. They invented it to reduce blog spam. If you use it in any other way, you are inviting trouble. If enough people invite trouble, the search engines will do what they must to secure the integrity of their results, and trouble is what they will give you.

I would strongly advise not using NoFollow.

[Catz]

I am talking about 15 sites with 50 subpages each

That is good to hear. Was hoping that was the case.

With so many pages to work with, you will have a lot of linking opportunities. If you plan your links with your visitors in mind, linking where it seems natural, it won't matter whether links are one way or reciprocal but do try not to have too many links on each page.

We don´t wanna take any big risks now that we are putting a real effort into creating great sites

Since you are going into it with the plan of creating great sites, you are ahead of the game already.

Quality over quantity, it is true regarding site content as well as linking.

[nethy]

But why would anyone not want to pass the juice to their corporate site? Seems nuts to me, personally.

Well I think the way they went about it (threatening penalties ans such) makes it quite reasonable to just nofollw all external links, if its easier. Especially if multiple (non specialists) are updating the site. If you are putting out a CMS, what potential harm is it to the site owner to nofollow everything and not thinkabout it. Especially of some of the links are sponsored, affiliated, paid. It avoids having to answer grey area questions.

There are no real downsides to the site owner. Who cares about false positives.

[amabaie]

Hmm. When at a job interview, best to begin all your answers with, "I might be wrong about this, but here is my response..." That's what NoFollow says.

If you want your website to carry any credibility with the search engines, why would you put NoFollow on any of them...including paid links. Sorry, but if you are accepting paid links, you either

a) believe the links are credible (or else why would you want them on your website, paid or free?) or
b) accept any link for a price.

Either way, your website will be judged by whom you link to. Placing NoFollow on links only casts doubt on your judgment in accepting the links. The whole concept of NoFollow, with good intentions, is pretty bad.

[Kenneth White]

This is the first time i have heard that nofollow links in and of themselves can be a bad thing on a website.

However this is something that our top competitors are not doing, and currently they are beating us in ranking... there seems like a lot of speculation, but no real hard evidense. I think i may remove my nofollows and see what happens.


My site uses nofollow's on the following pages:
contact us
site terms
privacy policy
login

[ozaark]

Placing NoFollow on links only casts doubt on your judgment in accepting the links. The whole concept of NoFollow, with good intentions, is pretty bad.

I don't think we can get down to ethics of using a nofollow.. (saying 'I don't want you to follow it because it's not trustworthy...' etc) I think that if you don't want a search engine to follow or index something you find unrelated to what you want to rank for you should be able to do that - it doesn't mean it's not credible. I could care less if the search engines index my site terms or similar. I need them there but I don't want people finding me in SERP's through them since they really don't target my overall audiences interests (interests=keywords). You can set your priority with xml sitemap and using nofollow here and there just extends that control IMO..

[Jill]

My site uses nofollow's on the following pages:
contact us
site terms
privacy policy
login

I'm fairly certainly, you'll not see any difference whether you nofollow those pages or don't.

[Kejsaren]

But please let us know the result!

[Kenneth White]

well,

we are supposed to roll out a total website redesign tonight, so i instructed our IT guy to remove any "nofollow" tags.

there will be more content and a very different layout to our site. So... whatever happens with our rankings, we will not be able to 100% attribute to removing the "nofollow" tags...