Should I dofollow or nofollow a replicated site?

[Mister206]

Hey Everyone. Fairly new here. I have a question thats been bugging me for a while.

I am a consultant for a company that allows us to build an additional site outside of the replicated site that the company provides for us.

So Ive built a site with several pages that rank fairly high for the keywords I have. Within the site I've built that is just a launchpad for the replicated site that people can buy from I have lots of outbound links to replicated site on another domain. Since I am linking to this site should I use nofollow on all outgoing links? Does this cause my site to bleed pagerank?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, Mister206.

In my experience, you should link to serve your visitors - and it sounds like that's what you're doing. Links from one website that you own to another website that you also own are natural enough. If your offering is solid, these should be a very small portion of your overall linking and backlink profile and will not be problematic.

Whether you use nofollow or allow the links to be followed makes no difference to the way PageRank is calculated today. Without getting into the math of it, the whole consideration about "sending PR into a black hole" is pretty much a non-issue today.

Yes, Google has made [many!] adjustments to the way they calculate PR. It is possible that they would decide on their own to diminish the PR transfer between sits that the same organization owns. That should not be a concern when it comes to linking in a way that serves your visitors.

[Mister206]

Thanks for your reply Tedster. So it sounds like ime doing it right.

If you dont mind answering 1 more question that has bugged me and a few other people I work with is. Our replicated sites are https: sites and we cannot manage how they are structured very well apart from our names and pictures to personalize. There are 2 or 3 people that have their entire site replicated sites indexed by google. Ive tried to submit ours to Google webmaster tools but unfortunately I cannot verify the site because of the limited options. I can give you the site in question if you can answer for you to look at to see what is different.

Thanks again

[tedster]

We really don't do private analysis or site review, here - sorry. Sounds like that company that builds the replicated sites is out of touch - how can it be "your site" if you aren't allowed to manage it?

It sounds like you bought into a product or service that was just too easy to be true - and it definitely is. If you can't place a simple verification file or meta tag on the site, then you do not have appropriate control at all. It's either your business or it isn't, but you're almost being held hostage.

I'd be outta there!

[penders]

IMHO links should only be NOFOLLOW if they are untrusted or have been paid for.

Google certainly indexes https (secure) sites. This may not have been the case 10+ years ago, but times change. I found this old thread, from 10 years ago! ...
Google Indexing Secure Servers? [webmasterworld.com]

(I'm still not convinced at how well the search engines in general index HTTPS sites, but that's just my opinion.)

[tedster]

I'd say search engines index https URLs just fine - when websites actually make intentional public use of them. The reason you see fewer in the search results is that in many cases, websites reserve their secure server for dedicated purposes and not their general content.

There are potential ranking issues with the extra time it takes to deal with SSL - but it's also clear that Google LIKES https for the future of the web and their working hard to make it happen. So if you are using https protocol, make sure that speed optimization has a high priority for the development. Simply using compression for text assets and really strong image compression goes a long way. And especially with secure connections, keep the total number of calls to the server as low as you can - things like CSS sprites and minified scripts can be your friend here.

[Mister206]

Thanks for your help Tedster. I understand that you cannot do private analysis. Im a consultant for a Candle Company that is pretty large company so Its not a fly by night company I just cannot edit it too much. I can only place google analytics code to track. Your help on my first question was help enough. Thanks