Just wondering if there is anything to be gained (or lost) from using rel="nofollow" on my site's outgoing links. The site is a small accommodation/tourism directory with lots of outgoing links. I know it's not so good for the people I'm linking to... but my site comes first
The people you are linking to will notice and any future contacts as well. I think you do more damage by using a nofollow. Use the blank target. Plus, you do get credit for outgoing related links (to a point).
OK understood. Thanks. I'm in a tinkering mood and am looking for things I can do - but I guess I need to just let my sites 'be' for a while - and let the spiders do their job.
Perhaps you better only use the nofollow tag in links to your linkpartners. It might be not very decent, but that might help you a bit since getting a link gives a better value than exchanging links. But good SEO is not about nofollow links, but using SEO friendly names for the names and URL's of your directories, categories, subcategories, anchor text, titles etc. Forgive my clumsy English.
DO NOT USE NO-FOLLOW TAGS! If I went through the trouble of submitting my site to your directory and you changed them to no-follow, I would be pissed. That defeats the whole purpose of directory submissions. No-follow is bad unless it's to prevent spam or on pages you don't want PR on (like contact pages, pages with no content or value to search engines, etc).
OK everyone I get it! mdvaldosta - this is a directory for sites that generally have absolutely no search engine ranking anyway. So nofollow wouldn't really hurt them, and judging by their sites they don't care about search engines anyway. But I'm NOT going to use nofollow. I get the message