NoFollow Advice

[driller41]

Hi, I have added the usual list of social network submission sites to the bottom of all my pages.

Should I also add a nofolloew to these links?, as all I am doing is passing a small amount of linkjuice to all these big sites who do not really need it?

[cabowabo]

I would add the no-follow ... as you don't need to be sending link juice to them.

[bilalseo]

you must use nofollow if you don't do any kind of link exchange...

[pageoneresults]

You must use nofollow if you don't do any kind of link exchange.

Uh-hum, that's not true.

Why would you add those to the bottom of all your pages? Why not create a single page listing them all and then link to that page if you want access from all of your pages. Don't bleed the PR from every page, just one. ;)

And forget about the nofollow unless you have an area where unmoderated UGC (User Generated Content) is present.

[maximillianos]

Amen pageoneresults. I cannot stand the use of nofollow for any other reason than spam control. In fact I think using it anywhere else is spammy.

But that is just me.

[Quadrille]

There's a lot of conspiracy theories around nofollow, and I've never understood why.

If you go to Google's Blog [googleblog.blogspot.com], there's a perfectly rational explanation of what it is and why, which makes perfect sense to me.

It's not about page rank (and any value there is going to be very marginal, if any).

It's simply about the difference between recommended links (which Google sees as links you choose to make), and non-recommended' links (which Google sees as links that may have been placed by third parties, eg on social pages, guestbooks, blogs and forums, and may be recommended by the person who placed them, but not necessarily by the site owner).

I've found it very helpful, and never felt in any way threatened by it.

I'm also utterly convinced that Google has factored into their algo in some way, and I never forget that nofollow was the first major initiative agreed upon by all the major SEs.

BTW, That doesn't mean 150 "Top SEs" that someone will submit your sites to, it means all of the top three ;)

[DavidAugust]

You may want to use XFN [gmpg.org] mark-up on the links to your profiles, like this:

<a href="http://www.example.com/profileusername" rel="me">my profile on example.com</a>

I use it on my site and it helps the machines to know that these are my profiles, that they are all by or of the same person.

[edited by: engine at 11:01 am (utc) on Jan. 3, 2009]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[BradleyT]

Why would you add those to the bottom of all your pages? Why not create a single page listing them all and then link to that page if you want access from all of your pages.

Because all of them use the referring page for the submission.

[maximillianos]

I embed all my "social" links in a javascript include. It helps modularize them, while at the same time limits the juice you send to them.