Ok... I have a site www.therandomforest.info. It used to be my main site but now serves as a place for sponsored posts, small little notes about my recent life, reviews and various other random bits. It has a PR3 and I get aroudn 20-30 visitors mostly from search engines everyday. Throughout the hindreds of posts there are obviously hundreds of links. It's a blogspot blog and I want to make it so that I am getting hundreds of people from search engines. Would I help myslef by going back and making all the links from past posts "nofollow" I know how to make things no follow but don't quite understand what it will do for me and if it will improve my rankings in Google for certain terms. People keep saying that follow links take juice away, why, how? Sorry if this sounds ridiculously dumb... I know I ma going to get slammed for this question! Thanks everyone.
you really forget this nofollow links with out going in to deep. This is the simple answer if you are making link for PR love.
Your outbound links won't hurt you unless they're linking to 'bad neighborhoods'. If the links are relevant, then keep them as is. If they aren't, I would add nofollow or remove them completely. These links won't hurt, nor will they help your search results. If you want to help your SERP (search engine results), you have to start building incoming backlinks.
Thanks a bunch. That was exactly the kind of answer I needed.... to the point. I guess I just need to get them back links running now. I have been lucky enough to be accepted into the Social Spark alpha so maybe I'll put a blog you back post on there for a start.
However you can build backlinks, build them. IBLs (incoming back links) - that aren't reciprocal links - are always best, and can never hurt your site. Again, on your site, just make sure that your links to other sites are relevant to your page's content. If the link isn't relevant, it may be a good idea to add rel="nofollow". Building IBLs aren't easy, but here's link-building ideas to start you off: blogging is a good way (you can attract people to link to your blog) writing articles and press releases help a lot too submitting to directories (especially ones that are specific to your industry) and having good content (people will naturally link to content that they find interesting). Happy building...