Hi there, On my forum I get a lot of various links posted, some of which aren't always related to the topic of my forum. Basically I'm just wondering if there is a way of adding the rel=nofollow command to any of the links that get submitted on the forum? Thanks for any help
Take a look at these posts... http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=189613 http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1214
Okay thanks a lot, will take a look at these. Do you think that having many links posted in a forum would actually damage the page rank at all? I mean if you look at this forum for example, there are so many links that get posted yet the site is still popular with great page rank and great search engine positions - so does it not really matter about the amount of links that get posted?
I run several forums and their pagerank is the least of my concerns to be quite frank. If you are looking to sell ad space off the front page on the strength of PR, then links in posts will not adversely effect the front page PR. I wouldn't get too far bogged down worrying about PR. Concentrating on offering good content and eliminating duplicate content will be time better spent (of course, that's just my opinion though.)
Okay thanks for the helpful reply again My thinking was that higher page rank would probably help with search engine rankings - and I would like to get the forum to rank for some terms in the search engines. Am I right, or would the page rank not really affect the ranking of the site? Thanks
If you have identified certain keywords and keyphrases that you think you would make solid gains on, then embark on a month long link building campaign using those terms as your link anchor. For example, if you have a forum about polishing turds and you see from Overture or WordTracker or the Google keyword ranking tools that "turd polishing forums" gets a 100 000 search volume per month, then you should try to build links to your site with the term "turd polishing forums" as the anchor text. You should probably keep it down to 1 or 2 keyphrases/words to begin with and should probably rate limit your link accrual to 100-ish per keyphrase per week to begin with. Also use your competing terms in your site's and forum's title, and be sure to write regular original entries with keyword-rich subject titles about turd polishing (so that you can maintain a certain keyword density on your front page.) In addition to this, sure go ahead and minimize PR seepage and be sure to nofollow your archives etc. You might be surprised with the results in a month's time...
If you implement a nofollow in links, members may not be encouraged to help you develop your forum. It's a give and take setup after all.