To Nofollow Or Not To NoFollow
I was thinking about the use of <a href="someplace.com" rel="nofollow"> and whether or not it should be used when linking to other websites that are not blogs when they are mentioned blog posts. Perhaps other people can help me determine whether or not this would be a good practice when blogging.
I remember hearing that it is better to have more incoming links than outgoing links in regards to PR (Pagerank) but please someone correct me if I am wrong. My thoughts about are that if I want to limit Google from crawling outbound links then the use of rel="nofollow" on the anchors would be best and hopefully in the eyes of the search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) it would look like my site is more useful and informative because more websites are linking to me than I am linking away from myself.
Does this sound right?
I was looking over at SEOBook.com and they have an article that kind of talks about the same issue. Though they say that “…you shouldn’t be afraid of a few reciprocal links with large trusted media sites either…” Sure they “few” but how many is a few? If I have a blog post and I list a manufacture like 4 times and hyperlink each of those times, am I going to be looked at as a link farm? I’m sure 4 links to one site isn’t a lot but what if I do it multiple times over the course of multiple posts?
So the question for me still goes unanswered: Do I use the Nofollow attribute when linking to websites externally that are not blogs to help make my site look more useful in the eyes of the search engines?
What do you think?
My quesion is… Why worry about it. I thought of adding the nofollow link to outbound links in my blog. But ultimately I decided it would take more time to set-up than it would be worth. Now I know I have the enviable position of having so few links out of my site that it would matter little. I gave up trying to improve my PageRank, just tooooooo many sites dedicated to other vypers. Damn you Suunto. Why not institute a partial nofollow list. Certain links would get the nofollow while ones that respect you would get a standard anchor tag.
Brennan the Vyper
I’m curious I like to try and figure out the best way to do things for the best results. It’s more of something that just popped into my head. I know my site doesn’t get loads of traffic but its steady and doesn’t fluctuate much either but I’d like to see how to best optimize for PageRank because some affiliate sites work on things like PageRank, Alexa Rating etc.
That’s funny. I just wrote an article yesterday about the nofollow attribute in blogs. Long story short, I am against having the nofollow link. I think that people should be rewarded for contributing to your blog, in one way or another. I think it also encourages people to comment without getting the meaningless comments that accompany the blogs with the top commentator plugin.
Sorry about the rapidfire comments, but with regards to pagerank, it’s been debatable whether or not having outgoing links is a bad thing. Generally, it’s agreed that if your site doesn’t look like a link farm, then your pagerank will not suffer. I think that if ou can write an article that is readable, then you shouldn’t worry about putting in too many links.
Allowing “link love” in your posts is a great way to get comments posted to your blog.
I’ve noticed that most comments are made in an attempt to get some “link love”…. thoughtful commentary is rare and when you allow a comment to be posted, the person who took the time to post a thoughtful response SHOULD be rewarded.