is it smart to use a No Follow tag on sponsor links ??
 

is it smart to use a No Follow tag on sponsor links ??

I am considering doing this on a blog but...

any opinions ??

It arguably wont bring you a lot of benefits, but at the same time, there's not much harm in it.

Is it worth the time it takes to do it? The tests I did say it's probably not. That is, I couldn't see any sign that it really affected positions or traffic.

Still, there's sometimes a bit of emotional satisfaction in it - knowing I'm doing my part not to add relevance to the sponsor over my own pages.

On the flip side, I've had a few sponsor links popup in top spots on the SERPs which led to sales.

So flip the coin?????

Well, with, a, oh damn, the expression is slipping my mind - ahhh, "canonicalization" I believe, supposedly the chances of a sponsor url appearing in the serps is now either gone or much reduced.

However, I haven't tested this. And I'm not really studying canonicalization's effects, I am just noting that there is a body of opinion that says that the glory days of getting ones own sponsor link listed as a high result are supposedly gone, because google uses canonicalization to replace that link with a direct link to the sponsors paysite.

So, canonicalization rewards the sponsor every time you put up a link _without_ a rel nofollow - in theory at least.

I personally haven't had a sponsor link get a good position in the serps for quite some time tho. Not that that is evidence of anything.

I'm not sure, but doesn't google for one look down on more than 100 outgoing links on a page...if they do perhaps cutting some sponsor ones with nofollow make make a dif

A few years ago I would have said yes. Now days though to the best of my data, Google doesn't place that much emphasis on the rel="nofollow" tag.

-N

Well, since we are talking about outgoing links, I wouldn't say that the pagesculpting repression applies. "In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site.", cutts says.

But, who knows, mebbe I've misunderstood pagesculpting.

But if I had to bet, I'd bet my dollar on "doesn't apply".

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Anyway, I'd say that the time involved to manually insert nofollows on sponsor links probably doesn't pay for itself. I did it for a while, like a lot of people, and concluded that at my scale of operations it just didn't matter.

But if somebody wants to put it on, it's not going to hurt them.

I usually do It on my bigger blog's.

This is a reasonable argument, altho, depending on who you talk to, one will hear that the 100 links rule was either always a kind of myth, or that it no longer truly applies.

I personally figure "100 links" no longer really applies. AND it was always a kind of myth.

BUT, the pagesculpting repression can be interpreted as meaning that google just 'evaporates' the page rank that would have been transferred to the sponsor on those nofollowed links.

But, it would have been "gone" anyway. Do I care how I 'lose' the pagerank, if google evaporates it, or if my sponsor gets it? No I don't care, unless I'm suspicious of the sponsor, and then I'd rather it evaporate.

So, if you dont like the sponsor, you can get a bit of emotional satisfaction by nofollowing the sponsor urls. Deny them the little bit of page rank and relevance the link transfers.

Nofollow no longer keeps the linkjuice for the dofollowed links unfortunately. It used to be a great tool for keeping more linkjuice to be handed out to links of your choosing, but its no longer the case :( Every link whether nofollowed or not will take a bit of juice out.

The only benefit i can think of is you are not helping the sponsor rank highly for terms you may be targeting too. Can't hurt to do it, but most of the benefits are sadly no longer there.

At one time, Matt recommended no following links to affiliates. The reasoning was that you didn't want to appear to be selling links to affiliates for page rank. In theory, Google hates it when people buy links...but they say that they understand that websites are there to make money. In practice, the folks that buy links are at the top for most terms.

On the 100 outgoing links, I think that that got misconstrued from google saying that they normally crawled the first 100k characters on a page....I'm not sure about that, but it's a theory. Of course, now google says that crawling more than 100k characters is not a problem for them.

I remember him saying that he recommended nofollowing _paid_ links, but i can't recall if he ever said anything about the kinds of affiliate links we use.

Not that my 'dont recall' means anything, i can't recall 3/4s of what i've read over the years about se strategy and tactics.

Yep, that's my understanding of the '100 links' thing too.

I don't always do it, but I do have Blogs Automater set to add the nofollow attribute to all links in sponsor RSS feeds. I know Google has changed how they distribute link juice and right now it just evaporates on nonfollow links, but since they could decide to switch back to their former method at any time, and since BA adds the nofollow with no work or time on my part, I'll keep doing that for awhile yet.