I've been doing lots of research for techniques to optimize my soon to be launched sites. I've established there are things I can do that are universally considered to be a good idea. These include titles, meta-descriptions, one-way on topic links, relevant anchor text, etc etc. There's one thing however that many respected SEO's have polar opinions on - the use of rel="nofollow" . Aaron Wall for instance thinks it's a bad idea but many others state the opposite. I've searched the forums for advice but I'm still unclear what to do. One of my articles contains many links to relevant sites but I have read that doing this can cause my site to 'leak' PageRank (when I get some) by diluting the ratio of incoming to outgoing links. I'm quite happy to link to sites I regard as high quality and are relevant to my readers but I do not want to jeopardize my rankings. If anyone that has an opinion I'd love to hear from them.
I had an email through from entireweb about links yesterday: http://www.entireweb.com/newsletter/archive/2007/ISSUE364.html It seems to be a widely held view that linking without pagerank bleeds some pagerank, but I certainly wouldn't say consensus because in the world of SEO there is hardly a consensus on anything. Dan Shulz makes an interesting point on these forums: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=3898696&postcount=2 Adding nofollow is all a bit of strange idea to me. It seems to start on a conviction that there is only so much pagerank to go around the world and so sharing it out means less for everybody Personally, I wouldn't do it. If I place a link on a website it's because I approve of what is on that site and want my readers to click through to read what is there. I'm not going to add a nonfollow link on a page. I think you'll being a bit of an arsehole really if you place nofollow links all over your website.
Modeca ... personally there is too much emphasis being placed on PR and people really do not understand the concept, let alone know that it is flawed. The proper approach is not to develop your sites for SEs. Develop your sites with the user in mind. Populate your sites with original and relevant content and link to whom ever you think you need to link to. Everything else will fall into place. cheers
Linking to authority websites with high page rank will increase your page rank. Keep this in mind from me. I would not use no follow.
Hey LaCabra, Thanks for your comments. However, I think your statement above is slightly idealistic. Surely the vast majority of the people on this forum want to develop their sites for search engines - otherwise we might as well give up and go home. I'm not too interested in PageRank per se. I realise that it is just an approximation of link popularity and is not the best indicator of a site's merit. I am just curious as to why so many people disagree with the idea of nofollow tags. I am hoping that my sites will be packed full of highly useful, original, innovative content that users will find compelling. That doesn't mean I'm not going to use every (white hat) trick in the book to make the search engines find my site compelling too Thanks to everybody for their comments, how about some from those in favour of the dreaded nofollow!
Why am I (and others) against it? Because if you use nofollow, you're practically saying for all intents and purposes that the link does not exist, that's why. I'm not so obsessive-compulsive about PR that I'm going to say "screw you" to other site owners. If I'm linking to them, there's a REASON why I'm doing so, and I want them to be rewarded for it. They're getting my endorsement on the Web page, they might as well get it in the SERPs as well. The trick however, is to make sure you don't load your pages with outbound links. One or two is fine, as long as you have other relevant pages linking back to your own. Even if they're relevant links from your own site.
modeca ... no problem - i respect your opinion but do remember wikipedia wasn't developed for SEs and they rank for many many terms.
The simple truth about nofollow tags is you use them on your internal structure to silo out your site. There's really no reason to use them on other outgoing links because you actually get rewarded from linking to other experts or authority sites. Use them to make sure topics stay within their topics. For example, You have a silo about german shephard training... Well lets say you have another silo/section about labrador training. Maybe you want to link to your german shephard training from an article in the labrador receiver article... Then you would use the nofollow tag so you do not dilute your themes. It's great to keep alike topics organized. It keeps your themes tight and "expert" in the eyes of the search engines...
Huh? What you just said makes absolutely no sense? What do you mean by "silo"ing your site? Do you mean structuring the site? That's information architecture. Actually, external links that don't have nofollow on them HURT your page's PageRank because you're taking part of your page's rank and giving it to another page. That's why rel="nofollow" is popular. Unfortunatley, many people seem to forget that you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want something, someone has to give it to you. And when they give you something, they no longer have it. However, they can make it up from other people giving to them, unless the people giving them the link lovin' uses rel="nofollow" on those links. Sorry, but this just doens't fly. Internal linking can HELP improve your overall PageRank, especially when done properly. Afterall a Web site is a collection of pages linked to each other with a common theme (topic). It just makes plain common sense to link to the other pages in your site (aside from the menu of course) so that people can read more about what you're talking about. It's the Web's version of a footnote citation. It actually does nothing for the search engines, believe it or not.
Dan, The information I just presented is what I learned from Bruce Clay at his SEOToolSet training. I have no evidence that suggests it is not true given it came from a very reliable source. Have you even heard of siloing your site? Sorry man but you are dead wrong here - keeping your themes tight will improve your ranking a ton. Go to bruceclay.com and look at their past articles - I think they wrote about siloing there. Here's one that explains using the nofollow tag to keep themes/silos tight. http:// www. bruceclay. com/newsletter/0906/silos.html (you will have to recompile this link- I added some spaces because I cannot post live links yet on my profile) As for external linking: What I meant is... External linking is great given you link to good related sites. If you are linking to something completely unrelated then I'd say nofollow is fine, but if it's related to your theme at all then I'd say leave it. Experts link to experts...
Allow me to say that your knowledges in seo are very poor. The google algorithm is not so simple as you may be tempted to believe. Your statement that external links that do not have nofollow on them HURT your page rank is extremely wrong. I guess all your seo experience is coming from reading other forums, where usually everyone post bullshit or what they have heard from unauthorized sources. Do some experiments and you will see the truth about the no follow rel. Linking without the no follow rel does not hurt your page rank and in many cases it even improves it.
I don't think this is true. External links don't neccesserily hurt the pr of the page they are on. Rather they hurt the pr of the subsequent internal links of the website.
l totaly agree him, also you should inform in somewhere of ur site that you made nofallow modivication for sem. otherwise it would be a cheat of ur guests.
Pagerank is about the strength and ammount of links going to your page. Not your outgoing links. Good outgoing links helps boosts your serps. AFAIK nothing to do with page rank. 2 Different things
nofollow is only for search engines. if you add nofollow, search engines will ignore that link. it will have no effect on seo (for you and the site you link)
You are wrong. Page rank is not calculated SOLELY as a computation of your inbound links and their strength you receive. If you have time, (i have done it once) do this experiment: Make 4 pages and place from your other websites the exact amount of links to them, as well as the strength. The links should came from the same websites for all your pages. Make sure that you do not get any other links interfering with your experiments. On those 4 pages you have created, place different links, some no follow, some do follow, some no links at all,sometimes link to authority websites, sometimes link to bad neighborhood , etc.. At the next page rank update you will obtain different pr values for these pages.
I think nofollow should only be used, when linking to pages that should not be indexed by search engines. This is what it was invented for. Examples of this include some affiliate links, members only pages, and URLs that are temporary. When normally linking to another site, you should not use nofollow.