Would adding this to outbound links make your reciprocal inbound links 1-way? For example you exchange links with 500 sites, their links on your site have rel=nofollow. Google doesn't follow their links, or give rank to them, does this mean that your links at their site are 1 way to your site?
i think webmasters today are very 'choosy' about linking to other sites. When i exchange links with other sites, i make it a point that page is indexed, and the links have no rel=nofollow in them. How can you get 500 link exchanges and make them rel=nofollow ? And if you change them to rel=nofollow later, i think thats cheating
Oh, don't get me wrong. I am not using this to cheat, or to flip the switch on people whom I exchange links with. I was just asking if this is how it works. I see most blogs nodays using rel=nofollow on all links posted in the comments and such.
Personally, I hate these rel=nofollow's. rel=nofollow actually means the link is not to be trusted, so why put such a link in the first place then? Warkot Don't know for sure, but the fact Googlebot doesn't follow such a link doesn't mean it doesn't know about it. I have a strong feeling Google will still see you are exchanging links here. And, of course, this would be cheating (not that you are going to use it. ) Nowadays there's lots of dishonest link partners that can double-deal you and use rel=nofollow. So I always use my link building tool to check for that. Boy, was I positively freaking out when I discovered some 20% of link partners for one of my sites were cheaters... Arggh! Warkot
I don't think that's the case. I'm pretty sure Google says that it's as if the link didn't exist at all. But I've seen other people do experiments where they think the Googlebot picked up a URL from a nofollow link and spidered it eventually.
Google created the "rel=nofollow" attribute originally to stem the comment spam that was being posted all over blogs in order to gain free links & PR. It has evolved into a tool webmasters use to make sure PR isnt leaked unnecessarily. But, as with all things, some people misuse it.
By the way, there are pretty good arguments for not using nofollow on your blog's comments section: http://nonofollow.net/index.php?title=Main_Page
I'm afraiid it's not just about that. Matt Cutts blog post on rel=nofolow: "However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)." What seems hugely hypocritical to me is that Google is strongly recommending link selling Webmasters to not do something they do all the time and actually depend on. Google's well-being depends on the paid ads/links they deliver to surfers. At the same time, they are telling me to put some machine code into my paid links that says "I can't vouch for this link, some anonymous Joe left it, so, Googlebot, please don't pass PR and look at the anchor text". Heck, if I put a paid link on my site, I sure know who I'm vouching for! I shouldn't be making Google's job of telling the good from the evil easier by putting rel=nofollows into my HTML code, especially since this pisses people off. It's Google's job, and they should've come up with a solution that doesn't affect the white-hat guys. Warkot
Gumbo: All I see is a generalized list of "problems", I see no good solutions put forward though? Google simply provided a way to cut down spam, its been abused but when you have a blog (usually high PR) and it is hit by constant link spamming, you soon learn why it can be put to GOOD use. Warkat: Im not sure if we are on the same page, you are commenting about link selling. Personally I wouldent pay for a "rel=nofollow" link and I do my homework on websites I advertise on. You seem to be moving off at a different slant? Google still follows (& searches) the link and it doesnt take two seconds to check whether another webmaster has imposed this on your link back, if so, simply avoid them in future.
Google's paid links are all Javascript, and aren't going to get picked up by a spider. If your paid links are in Javascript also, then nofollow doesn't make a difference. I don't know what counts as heavy spam. I get about 100 spam comments a day on various blogs, and nofollow doesn't help at all. The only thing it would help with is if I screw up and accidentally approve a spam comment, but as far as I know that hasn't happened yet. If every comment gets automatically approved, a blog is going to have so many spam comments that it's essentially unusable anyway.
Yes, I'm talking about paid links and that Google is telling link sellers how to run their business -- by strongly suggesting to use rel=nofollows on these links. This is a bit rich, considering Google's revenue depends on paid link ads. They can do it, we can't. Which is a little thing called hypocrisy. Me neither, because rel=nofollow basically says "this link is not to be trusted", which is just dumb. If I got paid to allow a link on my site, I can surely vouch for it. Warkot
Yes, and according to the google pagerank algorithm this could boost your pagerank a little because you're reducing the number of outbound links, which are a pagerank drain. I use nofollow only for affiliate links.
Hmm... According to Matt Cutts' blog, Google won't follow such links. Take a look here, for instance: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bot-obedience-herding-googlebot/. "At a link level, you can add a nofollow tag on the granularity of individual links to prevent Googlebot from crawling individual links..." It's another story if Google will still be able to detect RLE in the case we discuss, I have a feeling it will... Warkot
I use rel="nofollow" on affiliate links as well, or when I exchange links with sites that I do not approve (aka automated exchanges).