hi, i read that having to many external links will have a negative effective on your site so my question is i have alot of links like say in my page of where to get your painting supplies so instead of having these as text links i thought perhaps i have an image link instead so the robots can't tell it is an external link and it doesn't affet my site negatively. would that work?
No that doesn't work. use rel='nofollow' on the link. But why do you want to do that? If the link is useful to people then give it credit!
It is true that the image cannot be read by the bots but the link that the image was going to would. What tpye of use does the links have? Are they affiliate links? You might want to consider using No-Follow!!
There is no real reason to have 100s of outbound links on a page if it is a real site. If your are doing this, attach the URL so we can see what it is you are trying to do. This will just hurt you Page Rank. If you need to block the outbound links, you can use the <noscript></noscript> tags but all SEs will still see this. If you want to use the nofollow attribute, here is the format that works: <a href="http://www.catanich.com/" title="Internet Marketing Dallas Texas" rel="nofollow">Internet Marketing Dallas Texas</a>
if you use the "no follow", does it affect the SE spiders that you want to have searching these links?
thanks all for answering. no i do not have 100s of links and no they're not affiliate links although in the near future i would like to sign up for some affiliate programs. i have included my site myminiaturepainting.com for people to take a look. in my articles section i had two pages : acrylic paints and games company that had links to games manufacturers and acrylic paints. since i have no affiliation with these companies nor do i get any incoming links from them it would just be hurting my site right to have all these outgoing links?? there's about 15 -20 in 1 page and another 13 in another page. i have only included the links to enable my customers to go quickly to that site i thought it might be kind of handy. anyway i have remove all link for the moment till i find out what to do. this question led me to thinking that perhaps in my links section i shouldn't have too many links as well cos none of these people are in nyway linking back to me. i will leave the ones i have reciprocal links to. i'm pretty sure there's only less than 50 links in my link page. any help is most appreciated because i am very new at this and this is a completely new site and since i don't have many incoming links at the moment i don't want all these outgoing links to hurt my site.
You can't hide the links from bots but you can no-follow them to let the bots know that the link is not very important to you and that you still want it live there, indirectly you don't want to pass the PR juice