[lowkey]

Hi there,

I have my difficulties understanding the use of the nofollow attribute on outbound links. I mean, if I add nofollow to every link that is pointing from my forum to another website, does this have any negative impact on my page rank?

Right now, I see adding the nofollow attribute as a means of avoiding unpaid backlinks/advertisements on my site, but is there any other sense in using it? Or would you recommend not to use it at all?

Thanks a lot!

[Code Monkey]

It can't have a negative effect on your site. Google will still follow the links but you are telling them that they are not approved links and you will not be giving them any benefit of your sites ranking.

On the other hand, you will not receive the benefit of linking to sites with a common theme. Really, it depends on the site. If a site is subject to uncontrollable amounts of links, like a forum, then it's probably best to have no nofollow added.

[lowkey]

Alright, thanks for the information.

I have a forum, in which daily news almost always contain references to their sources in the form of links. I have also set up vbSEO to add 'nofollow' on any outbound link. Is this not good practice? Would you recommend turing it off? I don't fully understand the benefit other get from my site, which is still pretty new and does not even have a Page Ranking yet.

Thanks for your time!

[DJ RRebel]

My own understanding of nofollow is different (although I'm by no means an expert at all).

I think nofollow is more to use on links that lead to non-information.

For example .. the reply and quote links under each post. It serves no purpose for these links to be indexed as they don't lead to any new "core content" information. Same thing for functionality links like subscriptions and specific user experience features (like the new "turn customization off" in vBulletin 3.7's profiles). Even stuff like the register link and search or anything leading to something that requires real user input.


I can only guess using it in those cases would improve your ratings because the spiders would focus more on content related links.

[protos78]

Originally Posted by lowkey

Alright, thanks for the information.

I have a forum, in which daily news almost always contain references to their sources in the form of links. I have also set up vbSEO to add 'nofollow' on any outbound link. Is this not good practice?

It is a good.

Originally Posted by lowkey

Would you recommend turing it off?

No,leave it as it is.

Originally Posted by lowkey

I don't fully understand the benefit other get from my site, which is still pretty new and does not even have a Page Ranking yet.
Thanks for your time!

Let me describe how google Page Ranking works.

Assume that site A has a link to Site B. Google considers the link as a vote to site B. The greater the number of links to site B (greater number of votes), higher the authority of site B. That is, more inbound links are always better.

When site A has a link with "nofollow tag", it means that site A links to site B, but site A doesn't vote for site B.

Every webpage has a Page Ranking. Having nofollow links on the page means that web page will keep the authority for itself. It is always better to have nofollow links than regular links on your own website.