I added NoFollow to my TextLinkAds. Heheh.

Surprisingly, the pagerank of zero has not affected my traffic at all. Based on that, I've concluded that pagerank is not necessary for Google traffic. This has led me to ask two questions:

1. If pagerank isn't necessary for Google traffic, why would anyone care about pagerank?

2. Could it be that Google kept the site's pagerank at 3, but reported it as zero in the Google toolbar so that Google could scare site owners away from TextLinkAds?

 

Pagerank, as it's usually referred to, is an older metric. Having a high pagerank isn't absolutely necessary to ranking well on the SERP, but it is a factor. Less and less of one, as time goes on and other factors grow. Remember that Google's main purpose is to deliver relevant results. If their algorithm determines that your page is going to give the most useful result, it'll still rank regardless of whether you sell links or not. But you still need to worry about competition. What happens when both you and another site have similar content which is similarly useful to Google's users? Which one gets shown first? That's where the penalizations, pagerank, accessibility, standards compliance and etcetera come in.

 

Paintball Guns, I'm also coming to the conclusion that for now, the toolbar PR update is merely a device to put the frighteners on link sellers, although Google might at a later date stop sites from passing PR or decrease their trust rating, etc.

However, I wonder if your styling is actually parsed by Google? Have you tried a test?

 

I'll post the results here after Googlebot reindexes the site. If there is another way to test, please let me know.

 

Your method is flawed. crawlers won't take action on a class attribute telling it to not index one section of a page.

The available method to perform this function does exist and is this the rel=nofollow tag. It is designed to be adapted to anchor tags not paragraph tags. The links found with a nofollow tag are recognized and it is believed that they still are followed by the robots. What the tag will do is keep the "page" where the tag is found from bleeding PageRank to that specific link.

This is a direct quote from the top of the page that you referenced "This page contains brainstorming, thoughts, and proposals for extending the robots-exclusion microformat. "

Try reading more closely before posting deceptive information in these forums.

 

Bikeman, thank you for enlightening us regarding the technical aspects of this method.

Is there no way to add NoFollow to a section of text or otherwise prevent robots from passing link-juice from those links? Keep in mind, I cannot alter the section of text to which I am referring. If I could, I would just add the NoFollow relationship to the links. Instead, the section of text includes a reference to TextLinkAds javascript that populates the page with links.

For those who are still wondering whether the aforementioned method might work, check back in a few days. I'll post here after Googlebot crawls my site. However, I presume Bikeman is correct.

 

You can't have your cake and eat it too. FYI, that's how the saying really goes and that's how things are going to play out for you. You're pretty much duping your advertisers anyway. If people come across your site in the TLA marketplace and purchase text links, they're going to think that they're not nofollow. You're pretty much cheating. =|

EDIT: If you want to sell nofollow links and have them ACTUALLY be nofollow, btw, then create an advertise page and sell direct advertising on your site privately through email. Make sure to let people know those links are nofollow too.

 

The TLA Terms of service says you can't modify the code.....if you don't think you are doing anything wrong then just call them up and ask them if its ok?

 

This trick will not help for your website in future, for selling links.

Chaitanya Patel.
Sr. SEO.
cygnet-infotech.com

 

I've now realized there is no way to test to see if the method I used to block link juice from Text-Link-Ads links works. That is, I can't possibly know if Google is increasing the PR ranking of Text-Link-Ads sites linked from my site.

Thus, I am assuming that those who are more knowledgeable than me who said my approach would not work are correct. In other words, there appears to be no way to apply a "nofollow" attribute to links from Text-Link-Ads without modifying their code. If you know of a way, please tell me. Otherwise, alas, I will have to choose between TLA and Google pagerank.