nofollow on links

[bcl]

It's been suggested to me that putting a lot of links to one external domain from a single webpage without a rel=nofollow page could lead to a penalty from google.
This would include a set of links to an affiliate network, or direct to a merchant.

I'd never really thought about it, having been around longer than both google and nofollow tags, I just do what I do and let the search engines look after themselves.

Am I wrong? Would adding nofollow to external links help, hurt or make no difference?

[Eurisko]

About 3 years ago when I was client side I asked the same question to an SEO agency and they said that adding "nofollow- tags" to links COULD be considered blackhat SEO by the search engines and they COULD penalise you for it.

At the time it seemed like a very uncommitted response to a serious question, but they were the experts and my boss was not keen to test the theory.

It might be a case of trial and error on this one....

[bcl]

Originally Posted by Eurisko

About 3 years ago when I was client side I asked the same question to an SEO agency and they said that adding "nofollow- tags" to links COULD be considered blackhat SEO by the search engines and they COULD penalise you for it.

At the time it seemed like a very uncommitted response to a serious question, but they were the experts and my boss was not keen to test the theory.

It might be a case of trial and error on this one....

Yes I've always thought that using it implies something negative - like the links you have are only there for ranking, or that you're trying to do something clever with the search engines. But there seems to be a lot of advise otherwise. When it comes down to it the only one who loses if you test the theory is the site owner - to seo experts giving advise it's just another interesting experiment to test a theory.

[ikonic]

it depends on what the link goes to. nofollow only means don't give this page any link juice from my site.

if you are linking to affiliate links then google will detect it and take the approriate action.

therefore the best approach is to create a sub directory with a redirector page inside it which is blocked by robots and nofollow.

[bcl]

Originally Posted by ikonic

it depends on what the link goes to. nofollow only means don't give this page any link juice from my site.

if you are linking to affiliate links then google will detect it and take the approriate action.

therefore the best approach is to create a sub directory with a redirector page inside it which is blocked by robots and nofollow.

How does google know what an affiliate link is? Some might be obvious but a lot aren't.

And if the appropriate action if google thinks it is an affiliate link is to ignore it, is there any need to do a nofollow?

[newbie]

Originally Posted by bcl

How does google know what an affiliate link is?

Google knows what you are going to type before you do, and besides, there are not that many affiliate networks.

I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that Google regards affiliate links as having a lesser or a greater value.

We only redirect to make a tidier status bar (and stats).

...we won't be putting nofollow on any time soon.

[bcl]

Originally Posted by newbie

Google knows what you are going to type next, and besides, there are not that many affiliate networks.

I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that Google regards affiliate links as having a lesser or a greater value.

We only redirect to make a tidier status bar (and stats).

...we won't be putting nofollow on any time soon.

There are hundreds of affiliate networks at least, and there are many thousands of in-house programs. It was an in-house program that raised the issue and the concern was whether google would penalise my page with the links.

Some, but not all, networks block the search engines on their redirect - would that have the same effect?

[aguawebs]

I've used a link cloaking script on some sites without penalty.

Instead of linking direct to the merchant, its like an internal link - but then I disallow indexing of that directory using robots.txt

So my link is like:

www.domain.com/outbound/?id=34

I suppose if you were clever (and up for some brand bidding ) you could easily use:

www.domain.com/outbound/brand-bidding

Where brand-bidding could be any keyword

But not sure how that would work... nm... maybe I could experiment with these and see

[newbie]

Originally Posted by bcl

There are hundreds of affiliate networks at least, and there are many thousands of in-house programs. It was an in-house program that raised the issue and the concern was whether google would penalise my page with the links.

Some, but not all, networks block the search engines on their redirect - would that have the same effect?

I do not get it. Are you saying the inhouse program asked you to use nofollow links?

[bcl]

Originally Posted by newbie

I do not get it. Are you saying the inhouse program asked you to use nofollow links?

They suggested it might be a good idea to avoid the chance of being penalised, for my benefit.

I guess it's also for their benefit too, if my page being penalised would mean they would lose sales.

[newbie]

Originally Posted by bcl

They suggested it might be a good idea to avoid the chance of being penalised, for my benefit.

I guess it's also for their benefit too, if my page being penalised would mean they would lose sales.

How thoughtful of them.

Personally, I think all that stuff is rel="external nofollow hogswallop" but not to say I would ever disagree with ikonic.

[bcl]

Originally Posted by newbie

How thoughtful of them.

I thought so. It's what's generally known as working together for mutual benefit.

Originally Posted by newbie

Personally, I think all that stuff is rel="external nofollow hogswallop"

There are a lot of contradictory views out there on nofollow - mind you there are contradictory views on almost all seo techniques.

[newbie]

Originally Posted by bcl

It's what's generally known as working together for mutual benefit.

I think there is a lot to be said for working together for a mutual benefit.

The thing is that if you have not put nofollow on a link before and it hasn't hurt you, why start now?

We will start using the nofollow tag the day after hell freezes over.

[ikonic]

Originally Posted by bcl

How does google know what an affiliate link is? Some might be obvious but a lot aren't.

And if the appropriate action if google thinks it is an affiliate link is to ignore it, is there any need to do a nofollow?

meh. the metrics for determining an affiliate link are easy to grasp when you index 80% of the public websites outthere and its not something I'm going to bother with since I'm not being paid to explain it.

So, to make it as easy as possible for all to follow.

Googles SERP are primarily calculated based on the number of backlinks to each site which contain the relevant keywords in the anchor text. The more backlinks you have the more authority you are determined to have on a particular subject.

You can read a brief overview here (The Anatomy of a Search Engine) and one of their patents here (Method for node ranking in a linked ... - Google Patent Search)

Realising this, smart people starting writing automated tools to post comments/threads with links pointing to there sites using keyword loaded text in order to increase their perceived authority on the subject (since they are getting link juice passed across) and effectively reducing the sites page rank. Therefore to stop people stealing link juice the SE introduced the nofollow attribute to stop the page rank relationship.

As an example, people could previously create many message-board posts with links to their website to artificially inflate their PageRank. With the nofollow value, message-board administrators can modify their code to automatically insert "rel='nofollow'" to all hyperlinks in posts, thus preventing PageRank from being affected by those particular posts. This method of avoidance, however, also has various drawbacks, such as reducing the link value of actual comments

(PageRank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Finally, affiliate links are still affiliate links so adding nofollow to them doesn't stop Google from seeing the relationship, its only stops it from annoucing it publically.

[newbie]

double posted