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It's an excellent product, but there's one disadvantage: The software license requires that you leave a link to the home page of the software. That link is present on every page that is generated by the photo gallery, including the gallery index, every photo category page, and every page that displays a photo. The one saving grace is that every page is dynamically generated, so Google is less likely to index the pages.
If I'm willing to give up any benefit of getting those pages linked, does anyone here feel it is advantageous to place a noindex,nofollow meta tag in the headers for the entire photo gallery? I don't really need the gallery pages indexed, and I really don't want to risk my main domain name with a Google penalty in any way.
The gallery is of the format:
mysitename.com/gallery/
Would it be foolish of me to leave the pages index-able? I feel I am obliged to put in the noindex,nofollow tag.
I don't mind giving either product the small amount of PR and the credit they deserve, of course, but I don't want to risk a penalty. Admittedly the risk is fairly small.
Any PR passed on can be reduced significantly by increasing the number of internal site links on the page, such as by adding a nav bar. There are already a lot of links in the default config, so the PR not saved for internal use is likely to be minimal at best.
Personally I'm not comfortable with this level of linking, but you're right - a look around a number of the other sites who run the product doesn't show an immediately evident penalty.
The only thing I'd do is make sure you aren't posting your URL in the public forums of that site as that's the only place Google is likely to find links leaving the site and heading toward the seedy part of town.
The benefits of Google crawling your image galleries are many - especially if this software slaps the description into the ALT tag. And, while the bot won't crawl as deeply on dynamic pages, she'll still crawl 'em. I had a record crawl this month (looks like it just finished up here late yesterday). +/-25,000 Dynamic Pages. (Roughly 32K crawled altogether, but a number of them were duplicates hits getting grabbed by the "fresh-bot").
G.
It's my links to them that could hurt me - either being hit by a cross-linking filter, or if Photopost gets nuked by Google and described as a "bad neighbourhood".
The index page of their site is a PR6 right now. They have 3120 inbound links as counted by Google - just goes to show how little PR is passed on by that copyright link.
Apparently they've also not thought much about keywords in that link as it's simply the product name - IMO they could have done a lot more with that. :)
The danger that I see is if the site you link to gets a 'contagious' penalty. If that happens, then you could get a penalty too (even parts of dmoz.org have been known to suffer from linking to bad neighbourhoods). This would presumably happen even if you had just one link to them.
Hopefully their company site will only get a "contagious penalty" (hehehehe, lol, I like that phrase a lot!) if they choose to link foolishly from their site. I guess the result is no different to doing regular checks on the PR of pages I'm linking to anyway.
