Pixelrage.net

Like it or not, NoFollow is here to stay. I’ve actually grown to respect it as a webmaster – it’s a great way to retain page strength (I tried hard not to say “Page Rank” since I hate it), while giving visitors something good to reference while reading my articles. There’s only one issue: it didn’t exist before 2005 or so (most of us hadn’t even heard of it until an entire year or two later), leaving many of us with plenty of work to do.

Now that we all know what NoFollow is and how to use it, many webmasters and article writers have forgotten to apply it to the work we’ve done long ago. The idea dawned on me not too long ago: I have a hell of a lot of Squidoo lenses, Hubpages articles and otherwise that are referencing multiple Wikipedia links and other resources on the same page. Past projects including my Web 2.0 resource have a ridiculous number of outbound links, and have suffered in search engine results because of it (that one in particular is still getting a good deal of attention, but it was a top 10 lens back when I first created it!)

Dropping in NoFollow Where Necessary

Thankfully, it’s a simple fix…simply insert “rel=nofollow” before the closing bracket of your A HREF, and you’re done. The only thing that sucks is that you have to do it by hand, and holy crap almighty, can it take a long time when you have dozens of links on dozens of articles through the years! Do it at your earliest convenience, since you’re passing needless link juice on to websites that don’t deserve it.

One more thing before I close this article, be sure to always NoFollow your affiliate links and banner ads! NoFollow any links pointing to your social networking accounts (I’ve learned this the hard way: read my article about a -20 penalty for a DoFollow blogroll), e-mail addresses, and anything else.

If you’re using a CMS or WordPress, get into your header and footer, and “NoFollow” links to your RSS feed, About page, Disclaimer, and Terms of Service. Go into the code and stick NoFollow next to any link pointing to search results, archives, calendars or any other facet that isn’t deserving of inherited authority. Personally, I leave my tags and categories as DoFollow – some might argue that’s a bad idea, but I think there’s a point where things become too anal. After all, Google knows that there are computer illiterate people who will never use NoFollow, and they won’t get punished for it.

Think “NoFollow/DoFollow” every single time you post a link. Don’t forget! Nothing’s worse than passing on link juice from a well-established site through a handful of affiliate links.