Forum Moderators: martinibuster
nofollow was designed for sites such as forums, where 'outsiders' could post links on YOUR site; as you would not necessarily recommend those sites to yuor visitors, nofollow protects you from the consequences of others' actions.
If you run a directory, then no free sites would be listed unless you were agreeing they were worthy of a listing ... so you do not need nofollow.
On the other hand, sites paying for a listing may be sites you would not be listing unless they paid ... so you might like to consider nofollow, rather than be caught for selling paidlinks.
I suspect you've been a little misinformed about nofollow - read Google's advice on it - and you may have missed some of the recent developments on paidlinks.
Therefor, if you place links in a site where you have control over content, then it is fair to infer that you trust those links, otherwise you would not have placed them, and so no-follow is not needed.
Personally, no link appears on a site I control unless I deem it worthy. Therefor, I do not use no-follow.
There is now the attempt to expand the usage of no-follow beyond it's original intention to include notification of paid links. Many people have questioned this expansion and indeed, how one defines a paid link. I would suggest you have a look at the major directories and see if they use no-follow or not and you will have your answer.
The message from Search Engines these days seems to be to "build for the users". So, if you are building a quality directory with the user in prime consideration, then there should be no need of bells and whistles that have no bearing on the user as all.
Sometimes we think too deeply about these things and get caught up in intricacies that really don't matter. Often it is just better to keep on with the basics.
Onya
Woz
No use of keeping rel=nofollow tag in the onsites (outbound links ) google will crawl the links, This is my experience which i has faced befor a week, I was shocked when i see the that link with nofollow is get cached by google.
I think rel=nofollow is specially meant for blogs only so why google is crawling the link from the onsites.
nofollow links have always been followed by SEs, and this has never been a secret.
What doesn't follow is any ranking or 'credit' or 'blame' for those links.
It's nothing to do with stopping spiders; it's to do with stopping some of the effects of linking, not linking itself. nofollow links work perfectly as links - so spiders will always follow them.
one more thing i would like to let you know that competitors are not getting any back links from any other sites, the only site is ours who is giving oneway link so i inserted nofollow tag to avoid but it has not worked.
If you have a properly set up nofollow, it isn't from you - though they may be getting visitors from you.
There's rarely much value in obsessing about your rivals; much better to concentrate on your own site, and be sure it gets the rankings it deserves. You can learn from rivals, for sure - but you can never know 100%, what makes them tick, and you'll risk madness trying ;)
