Chris
06-17-2009, 01:29 PM
In light of my recent blog post:
http://www.websitepublisher.net/blog/2009/06/17/nofollow-pagerank-manipulation/
I've been making some changes.
I've discovered one of the biggest places I had used nofollow was forum links. On various sites I take forum content and display it on non-forum pages. The simplest method is showing the last 10 posts on a homepage (like on this site). In many places I had rel=nofollowed the links to the user profiles, in others I left it to the robots.txt which I had already used to block profile pages. On some pages each post I pulled out had 3 or 4 garbage links attached to it pointing to various forum pages that were unnecessary, all of which I nofollowed.
What I've done instead is started removing those links entirely. Right now on this site's homepage the "Recent Forum Posts" has a link for the thread title, and also the last poster. I'm going to be removing the last poster link and just display it as text. That is 10 less worthless links on my homepage diluting value. Not that I would be losing ALL PR from those links, since it is internal, but it is still a worthless link.
On some pages though with 20 posts displayed I had as many as 60 or 80 links nofollowed that were going to useless forum pages. In the changes I just now made to my literature site I probably removed (changed to plain text) 10-20,000 links in the last hour that had been nofollowed. I'm willing to bet I get a PageRank bounce with that kind of volume.
http://www.websitepublisher.net/blog/2009/06/17/nofollow-pagerank-manipulation/
I've been making some changes.
I've discovered one of the biggest places I had used nofollow was forum links. On various sites I take forum content and display it on non-forum pages. The simplest method is showing the last 10 posts on a homepage (like on this site). In many places I had rel=nofollowed the links to the user profiles, in others I left it to the robots.txt which I had already used to block profile pages. On some pages each post I pulled out had 3 or 4 garbage links attached to it pointing to various forum pages that were unnecessary, all of which I nofollowed.
What I've done instead is started removing those links entirely. Right now on this site's homepage the "Recent Forum Posts" has a link for the thread title, and also the last poster. I'm going to be removing the last poster link and just display it as text. That is 10 less worthless links on my homepage diluting value. Not that I would be losing ALL PR from those links, since it is internal, but it is still a worthless link.
On some pages though with 20 posts displayed I had as many as 60 or 80 links nofollowed that were going to useless forum pages. In the changes I just now made to my literature site I probably removed (changed to plain text) 10-20,000 links in the last hour that had been nofollowed. I'm willing to bet I get a PageRank bounce with that kind of volume.