is there a way to add "nofollow" to all external links?

hi
If don't want add "rel=nofollow" to all "<a" tags, is there a way to make all external links "nofollow"? (like, insert some code in head)

thanks!

 

There really is no need to add nofollow to your links.

Google came up with this tag for unapproved, immediate links added
to a website. Like comments in a blog. This was to prevent PR juice
being passed to the link.

That's all it was intended for. Now, people seem to be using it for
all sorts of things that are just not in the mix.

And nofollow does not mean don't crawl, index, or recognize them.

Outbound links have little effect.

Just think of some of the long threads in this forum. How many posts
and links are in the sigs? But that has little to do with the SERPs or
PR of digitalpoint. DP has literally thousands of outbound links. And they
are mostly unrelated to anything.

Stephen C

 

stephenc is right. There is virtually no call to use nofollow. Outbound links actually do help your page. nofollow, doesn't mean you get to keep the PR juice either - in fact the PR juice just dies, no one gets it.

If you have 10 links on a page then the PR will get split into tenths and go to the ten links but that doesn't mean your page now has zero PR either - the originating page won't lose PR by linking out. If the page won't lose its PR, then it is just a matter of how much it gives to the different links, which depends on how many links there are as well as the positions and style of the links.

If we ignore position and style and content for the sake of simplicity then each links gets 1/10th PR (we had 10 links). Now put nofollow on five of those links. You think the PR would then get split in 5ths and go to the five remaining links (so each of the 5 remaining would get twice as much)? It doesn't work like that though!

Google still sees you have 10 links, and it still splits the PR in 10ths and gives only 1/10 to each to the 5 remaining links. The other 5/10 (half) of your pages PR that would have gone to those nofollowed links will just evaporate. No one gets it. You don't get it back (the originating page won't lose any PR anyway - the other links don't get more either though, they get eh same amount as if nofollow had not been used).

So when you use nofollow, all you are doing is making sure that link doesn't get PR, but the PR it would have got is just gone, it can't go to any other link.

So why even use it? Well, maybe just to discourage spammers who are only after a backlink. I could only see that being needed in unmoderated systems that are experiencing major backlink oriented spam. The key word there is unmoderated. Moderation is a better solution. Nofollow really just doesn't make any sense. How will you feel when everyone puts no follow on all of your naturally occurring backlinks, when they don't even get anything out of doing it!?!

If all the forums and blogs and social networks get nofollowed then how can backlinks be any kind of measure of popularity? Those are all the places that natural backlinks would have occurred.

That said, if you really want to nofollow everything, you should look into PHP, or maybe ASP. I would recommend PHP. I'm sure plenty of people have already done exactly what your looking for using PHP and you could just google PHP nofollow script and find many solutions. Most of the common CMSs (wordpress, drupal, joomla, etc..) also have this capability - either built in, or as some kind of addon.

On my personal sites I check out all links, and if they are to pages that use nofollow, then I delete link along with the content that included the link. That is the only way to really "nofollow" anyway! Just remove the link. Then google won't split up the page rank for that link at all. In the above example - if instead of nofollow we just deleted 5 of the links, then google would really split it up into 5ths and give each remaining link 1/5 instead of 1/10.

The point though is that you can't expect people to help you out when you go out of your way to make things harder for them. If you let the PR flow it would help those sites which are getting associated with your site and thus put them in better positions to help you too. In general causing the natural linking associations that develop between different sites to benefit all sites involved.

So in such an environment, if you are going to go out of your way to make it harder on others just for the heck of it (since you don't even get anything out of it), then don't be surprised when your backlinks just start to disappear, or comments that link back to you get deleted.

Remember too, that if you delete someone's link you really should delete their content as well (comment, post, whatever). Keeping the content they posted (and likely benefiting to some extent from it) but deleting the link is pretty underhanded. Especially when you realize that having lots of links is not going to hurt you anyway. It can even help you in many ways.

If you are concerned with giving plenty of PR to some specific links, then nofollow won't help anyway (since that nofollowed PR just evaporates). Removing other links might help but that may require removing content, and it would help only marginally anyway, whereas those other links themselves can be leveraged to help more than marginally in their own ways. The far better approach is to make sure your primary links that you want to focus more PR on are well placed on the page, within the context of the primary content. If this is done right then additional content which follows the primary content and also links to other resources (even better - keyword targeted resources) will not detract, but will only help to improve the pages PR which is what will really gives those links juice anyway!

Google likes content, fresh content, and links are a part of the content that google likes. Just throw away PR juice for no reason at your own risk. Other sites give you PR, if they see you are just throwing it all away, well what would you expect to happen? Think they will decide to give you more PR? Or maybe they would give it to some one else who doesn't just throw it all away.

Bloggers should look into disabling nofollow, it may be on by default, but not really helping you.

 

I envy your motivation, linehand. I could never write so many words in one post...

 

you can insert some code in the head section of your page but then make all links "nofollow"

 

If you add a nofollow to avoid the link exchange forget it it's not a good avenue because Google will consider that all your outbounds links have a nofollow link and your ranking might be affected in the long run in that case and your site might even be seen as a spam site....In my opinion you can do it but not on all of them especially if you have the juice from those sites coming in yours....You have plenty of other method to get plenty of quality links without having to give a link back to those sites.....

 

It is only useful as a spam deterrent. Nofollowing your links will have ZERO effect on your own SEO. So why would you want to nofollow links for a link exchange? What would be the point?

 

usefull informaiton

 

Nofollowing links preserves pagerank on the page it's put on, so yes, it does have value.

 

Can you possibly clarify exactly HOW it preserves page rank?

Look,
PR 10 page with ten outgoing links
10 links = 1/10th PR to each link
(PR 10 page is STILL PR 10 - No reduction in PR occurs)
5 links nofollowed & 5 links followed = 1/10th PR to 5 followed links & 0 PR to the nofollowed links
(google still sees that page has ten links and still splits PR in tenths and still only gives 1/10th to the 5 remaining links - the link juice that would have gone to the nofollowed links just disappears, it does not get redirected, it just disappears)

Note that in both examples the originating pages PR will still remain 10. When you give PR to another page, you don't lose the PR.
Note also that these examples are simplifications. There are many other factors involved such as positioning of said links, context, anchor text, etc. which all effect how much PR is given to each link - it is not divided equally as in the examples, but this does accurately demonstrate how nofollowed links effects PR distribution (it doesn't really - it stops PR from going to the nofollowed links - nothing more, and you still lose that PR as far as remaining links are concerned).

In most cases nofollowing your links will not help you and may well hurt you. Just stop and think about. People imagine that nofollow will make google not count links when distributing PR, but this is simply not true - just consider the above examples.

This information is straight from google, and from people who work for google and are authorized by google to explain google's policies.

There is a GREAT DEAL of WRONG information and MISCONCEPTIONS on the net regarding nofollow and PR. Be skeptical and go to the source. If it is not a google employee who is posting the info, then use that info at your own risk.

If you have links to bad neighborhoods then nofollow may help you avoid association to those bad neighborhoods - but if you have 100s of spam links that are nofollowed, google may still penalize you for it. Because nofollowed or not your site is still spammy and you should get it under control.

Again ronmojohny, how EXACTLY does nofollow preserve pagerank of the originating page?

 

Linehand,

Nice info and detailed response.

 

Wow! There's been some very lengthy posts about just what does and does not happen due to setting rel="nofollow". Unfortunately most of the posts in this thread are simply wrong. If you want to know what effects nofollow has, ask the source.

cheers,

gary

 

Well, it sounds like you are implying that the information I have posted here is incorrect. But the link you gave does not actually even look at the issues which I have raised here. It does not say what happens to the PR that would have gone to the nofollowed link. I can't be bothered to go find the page where Matt Cutts from google clarified this issue for some of us, but whatever - you can just believe what you want to - since your reference does not address the subject.

The fact is, the examples I gave above do accurately demonstrate what happens to PR when you use rel="nofollow". The info on the page which you pointed out does not conflict with the info I have posted here.

Google should be more transparent about this. It is kind of lame that their own official info on nofollow fails to address the technical specifics of what happens to the PR exactly. They make it so you really have to dig to find any detailed info about how exactly PR is handled when using rel="nofollow". I think this is partly because they play it close to the chest when it comes to info about PR in general. It is also partly because google wants you to nofollow everything, because then only a limited number of very specific means (many of which which they exert great influence over) will pass PR at all anymore. Well that would make their job much easier and it will make it much easier for the big players to exert a much higher degree of control over the SERPs in general.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, google often does mention how it won't do much if anything for SEO and they seem to encourage its use as an exception not as a rule. Plus Matt Cutts has buried the answers to how exactly PR is handled for nofollowed links in some google group discussion, or comment on his blog. I have also seen some solid 3rd party tests which draw the same conclusions regarding the behavior of PR on nofollowed links.

Anyway, a lot of us will check all links and if your page uses nofollow we will remove your link from our page. We don't want to give you any PR if you are just going to sit on, especially when it would not hurt you at all to just let it flow.

Use it as the exception, not the rule.. There are far better and less destructive ways to fight spam which won't potentially bite you later. And discouraging spam is really all rel="nofollow" is good for. It is useless for SEO, except in the case where SPAM is hurting your SEO, but in that case you would do better to address the spam through other means. A major aspect of SEO is backlinks for your site. You need other sites to provide those backlinks. Do you really think that showing all those other sites, who's help you need, that you are not willing to do the same for them, is going to be good for SEO? Not likely.

 

@linehand:

The reference I posted does, indeed, address issues you raised. You say you take your authority from Google, yet you don't give your source. You also talk of third party sources without naming them or providing a link that we might read for ourselves. In that light, yes I am implying strongly that you are wrong.

gary

 

@kk5st

I read the entire page you linked to and there is nothing on that page which conflicts with what I have said above. The only way you could think that info is in conflict with what I have posted here is if you are making wild assumptions due to the vagueness of the info you linked to (it is very vague). If you really think that page says something which conflicts with what I have said here then by all means please clarify.

I don't want to argue or get into a flame war here. Seriously, if I am wrong I will be the first to admit it because my only goal is a better understanding, I have no interest whatsoever in being right.

Yeah, I know I should give you my sources, sorry but I don't know if I could even find them again. I do know that after finding lots of conflicting info when researching this a couple months back, it was Matt Cutts from google who clarified things for a few of us on google's discussion boards. I should go ask him about this again just to prove the validity of what I have said here, but you know what, I don't really care that much whether you or anyone else believes me.

Though you have not disproved anything with your link because, like I said, that info does not actually conflict - if you think it really does conflict, please point out specifically where it conflicts, because I really do want to know.

 

Using this as a quick example:

Google does not include nofollow links in any way in its computations. As far as Google is concerned, there are only five links on your example. Nofollow links just simply do not exist for Google.

I can imagine many scenarios where having certain links nofollow. I cannot imagine a case where it would hurt a given page to have nofollow links, your comments notwithstanding.

cheers,

gary

 

Well, sorry to tell you this but you are quite simply wrong here. You are reading an awful lot into the info on that page you linked. What you said is not actually stated on the page you linked, but rather your own loose interpretation.

I will quote Matt Cutts from Google:
"So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each."
~Direct Quote from Matt Cutts who works for google and who's job it is to clarify such issues. See below for a link to the source of this quote.

So according to that, ten links splits PR in tenths even when nofollow is used on five of them!
PR=10
links=10
1 PR to each link.

PR=10
nofollowed links=5
followed links=5
still 1 PR to the followed links (not 2), and 0 PR to the nofollowed links.

Source: google employee Matt Cutts' own blog post regarding nofollow
Please read that page. Also read the comments. And Matt's responses to the comments.

For instance:
Joe Hall said;
"So just for clarification: No-follow links do not pass PageRank, but, they do act as part of the equation that calculates the amount of PageRank that do-follow links pass on the same page?"
to which Matt replies:
"Joe Hall, correct."

People talk in detail about the evaporation of PR with nofollowed links in those comments, and Matt is right there and not denying any of this because it was him that originally clarified this for us and among that crowd it is common knowledge. You still have to read between the lines a little and dig deeper than google's official policy page to get the real, current scoop but the truth is out there.

For the record, I will never just make something up out of the blue, and if my info is from even slightly questionable sources I will always make that clear up front. But the fact is that ALL of the info I posted in this thread is DEAD ON ACCURATE!

 

All you should use nofollow for is if someone else posts urls (you might not trust)... so for forum, blog, comments you might have it if people love spamming bad links.

Early on a was actually going to set all external links to no follow to see if there would be an increase in page rank at all (mucking with SEO too much I just managed to decreased it pagerank 2 to 1 - google might see it as blackhat SEO and not trust you as much?). I learnt my lesson. I have actually asked google about this and they said link to those sites you love and trust. So long it's not infected, labeled a bad site, too much of subjects, or you have 1000+ links on a page, its fine, else use no follow for those you don't trust.

As for the page rank so called leak, it's calculated in a way which means you will barely make a difference trying to Blackhat SEO anyways by using 'no follow' on all external links. I believe the links are also checked for surrounding text, if it's clicked a lot or not at all, how many other links are on the pages, etc.

 

Reputation added mate

 

@linehand

I know what you are talking about, the issue was discussed on SEOMoz and came to light when everyone was talking about the benefits of funneling page rank to the most important pages on your site using the nofollow tag.

The take home message was basically it was best removing the link from the page then to use the nofollow tag.