I have been pondering about the whole no follow and what is said to be
sites that leak? I went out to find good examples to show some others
examples of but did not.
So I went out looking for sites which lead the talk on proper uses of
of no follow but looking at those same sites pages, found that there
are no uses of "no follow" attributes in any of their codes? *all out
going links with no attributes, not even no follows to internal keep
the bots from getting in a loop? its like really no use of them.
Then, looking at sites that have actual results in "return links"
where they originate do not have "no follow" attributes. and many
searches show pages can be high or low ranking, but in the results for
returned links.
It would be great to have some that actually talk the talk, apply it.
And do well using them. I have looked at major blogs, link pages, and
so on. but have not really seen many major movement going with the
flow.
I do use some "No Follows" on my site(s) but expected to see more
sites to be using them? to be able to say there see those sites use
them as well.
Other web masters that I talk with outside the Google boards believe
why do it when no one else is doing it. That is why I was looking for
some examples, because I am tending (have not made my mind up) to see
or agree with what they are saying.
I have read the guidelines where to use them but have not seen much of
that applied on other sites.
> So I went out looking for sites which lead the talk on proper uses of
> of no follow but looking at those same sites pages, found that there
> are no uses of "no follow" attributes in any of their codes? *all out
> going links with no attributes, not even no follows to internal keep
> the bots from getting in a loop? its like really no use of them.
Can't give you exactly what you're asking for.
But you can see by searching these groups that I've often recommended
them, and from the Wayback Machine that I've been using them myself.
It's mostly a question of common sense really.
If you have a bunch of links to other sites that you really don't know
anything about and can't vouch for then I would no follow them. If you
have links that are only there because someone has paid to have them
there then use no follow. If you have links that are there because
they lead to a useful resource for your readers then do not use no
follow. In simplest terms no follow for advertising and not for
referals.
The biggest worry with this is that very soon it will be near
impossible to get good inbound links that are not no followed. It is
only a matter of (very short) time until people start using no follow
on every link just in case.
With internal links I use no follow to tell the SE's that the page
this link goes to is not that useful to someone searching. e.g I have
internal links that lead to reply forms, search queries, subscription
info etc that are of no use to someone searching on Google and these
are all treated to no follow. It's not so much that the pages are low
quality, it is just that I would not expect anyone to get any value
from them as a landing page from search query.
Is any of this necassary on internal links?
Probably not, but having 20,000 useless pages indexed is not as useful
as having 50 excellent ones in my book.
Some other people I contact with on a regular basis do not believe
in the whole
no follow idea. They say find other sites which apply no Follow to
outgoing links to related
sites. Also I have been told and looked at many High PR sites which
have out going directories.
Even looking at some sites useful (good) handpick links pages, and
those automated link directories
never really seem to use the attribute.
Even when looking at day to day site pages where people refer useful
or directional links to articles outside of a site do not use the
attributes "No Follow".
Just asking in general if anyone else is seeing more ad more uses,
or trend uses of applying it.
I tried finding them on large newspaper companies with articles, or
service sites, message boards, but did not see it being applied.
> > So I went out looking for sites which lead the talk on proper uses of
> > of no follow but looking at those same sites pages, found that there
> > are no uses of "no follow" attributes in any of their codes? *all out
> > going links with no attributes, not even no follows to internal keep
> > the bots from getting in a loop? its like really no use of them.
> Can't give you exactly what you're asking for.
> But you can see by searching these groups that I've often recommended
> them, and from the Wayback Machine that I've been using them myself.
> It's mostly a question of common sense really.
> If you have a bunch of links to other sites that you really don't know
> anything about and can't vouch for then I would no follow them. If you
> have links that are only there because someone has paid to have them
> there then use no follow. If you have links that are there because
> they lead to a useful resource for your readers then do not use no
> follow. In simplest terms no follow for advertising and not for
> referals.
> The biggest worry with this is that very soon it will be near
> impossible to get good inbound links that are not no followed. It is
> only a matter of (very short) time until people start using no follow
> on every link just in case.
> With internal links I use no follow to tell the SE's that the page
> this link goes to is not that useful to someone searching. e.g I have
> internal links that lead to reply forms, search queries, subscription
> info etc that are of no use to someone searching on Google and these
> are all treated to no follow. It's not so much that the pages are low
> quality, it is just that I would not expect anyone to get any value
> from them as a landing page from search query.
> Is any of this necassary on internal links?
> Probably not, but having 20,000 useless pages indexed is not as useful
> as having 50 excellent ones in my book.
I don't know if you have seen this, but if you use Firefox there are
some simple ways to highlight links which have a rel=nofollow
attribute. One way is described on http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seeing-nofollow-links/ , a simpler way could be to use one of the Firefox extensions. You can
find these extensions by doing a search like
http://www.google.com/search?q=nofollow+firefox+extension or perhaps
one of the users here can make a recommendation based on their own
experience.
One you have something like that installed, you'll see that there are
a lot of sites which use the rel=nofollow for various forms of links.
One (controversial) example of a site which uses this microformat
extensively is the Wikipedia. I'm sure others here can post a whole
list of sites that use it.
Thank you, I was out from summer till now and missed quite a bit. I
had an email about pushing mattcutts articles from an web pro news but
have been skipping those since summer. Just wanted to make sure I put
time in well spent then undoing something not worth doing while I have
time to do it.
I guess that answers that and will go back and catch up on those. And
forward them to the other people outside the this group.
> I don't know if you have seen this, but if you use Firefox there are
> some simple ways to highlight links which have a rel=nofollow
> attribute. One way is described onhttp://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seeing-nofollow-links/ > , a simpler way could be to use one of the Firefox extensions. You can
> find these extensions by doing a search likehttp://www.google.com/search?q=nofollow+firefox+extensionor perhaps
> one of the users here can make a recommendation based on their own
> experience.
> One you have something like that installed, you'll see that there are
> a lot of sites which use the rel=nofollow for various forms of links.
> One (controversial) example of a site which uses this microformat
> extensively is the Wikipedia. I'm sure others here can post a whole
> list of sites that use it.
> Some other people I contact with on a regular basis do not believe
> in the whole
> no follow idea. They say find other sites which apply no Follow to
> outgoing links to related
> sites.
Where did "related sites" come from?
If you check http://www.isham-research.co.uk/quattro/links.html you'll
find only three or four links nofollowed. And actually, pretty much
all the links are "related". Certainly none have been sold or
swapped.
It's quite obvious (well, it is to me) that there simply wouldn't be a
web if _every_ link were nofollowed, but I don't know of anyone
suggesting that.
Computer programs have no idea what "related" or "relevant" means.
They can only match words. If the word "shoes" appears on both web
pages, that adds one count to the number they call "related". To a
human looking at the pages, they can be obviously unrelated. However,
the search engines can't see that.
They can look for the word "paid" but that doesn't tell them the links
were purchased. No matter how they try to do it, the search engines
can only count matches and set numbers to establish too many or too
few.
Phil had a point, I believe he was asking me why I put that in an
early above post.
I believe he was asking for clarification to what I meant about useing
a no
follow on a related link to a site.
reason: It was my mess of thoughts 5lbs shoved in a 1lb bag post,
I tried to approach not a specific point, but a general point.
Let me say it this way...
When looking at how Google dislikes a page sending
direct links to every url embedded in the code.
Such as like farms, or a site with relative & related types of sites.
and how it is expected that NO Follows should be used on paid links
which have no relative & unrelated connection. That form of stopping
major keyword terms being mass sold for money, or PR leaking.
I read another thread of yours "relative & related " and agree that
they are only
matched for the word. and G would have a hard time matching "Baseball
Bats"
with "halloween bats". I have had Google match my site content "self
proclaimed
web masters" along with other non related topic "self proclaimed Moms"
&
"self proclaimed food aholics" Google just keyed in on text content
only for unique
text content which then bit me in the butt.
----- Please note this paragraph was hashed out, and I do not wish to
bring that up again.
But back to sites with no follows & related & unrelated or paid links.
Looking at common sites like Military DOT com. they have many various
urls which are
the same network neigborhood. or even news article sites which have
many articles
pointing to outside sites.
My general point was why do you not find any real bulk of sites using
No Follows on
text links, article links, paid or unpaid text links. Sure you might
find a few here and there
on sites like web masters, but not on large corporate sites.
I understand G suggest useing them, it helps them find related sites
better, or to filter out
not going or counting bad site, and excuse those sites that sell paid
link not to hurt you.
This is not an easy point to make in black or white, because many
sites don't abide by it,
while others do apply it.
OK wrapping my thoughts here in this,
...........WHY are there not more if any real MAJOR uses
of this being applied in leading sites? that just makes me wonder
about such other things.
-- They have so much PR they could care less if some links leak? They
will make it up the next
run threw of bots picking up the new pages pointing back at them for
articles & traffic use.
-- Yet while small sites might try to filter or direct what small
amount of PR it has to work with. The Bot
is done comes back in a month and reads "Hmmm content still the same,
see you a little later on next time"
-- It is only my believe that the PR is really a factor of search
query and the traffic that follows those results.
Over time if the same results come up, those which visited your site
and know whats is there will skip your
#1 position and check out #2-5. when the Google search results sees
that the #1 link falls in traffic & #5 results
gets more traffic, WELL the link must be more useful the our searching
visitor's, so 1 drops & 5 moves up.
-- BUT my opinion is that the more traffic for a keyword result over
and over again can tilt the balances running one site
way up, while the other gets run into the ground. AND it is my belief
that happens when people sell/buy text & term word links
which cause that.
ONLY my Opinion, by Google having Guideline of No Follow would help
some on the paid word term links, it still needs to
figure out a way for the word term search traffic getting sent to a
site that has not been filtered yet by Google, because of
MSN or Yahoo search results would could care less. that same G
analytics picks up the Keyword that brought it to a site.
Let me stop, It is hard to put a finger on how G's algorithm truly
works, and as soon as you see a pattern another input block
of information like page code, or data from Analytics, or site maps
findings, & bots last crawls can skew what was thought to be.
Thas why so many people struggled to get freash content like a news
rss feed, but that was a band wagon, it seemed it was everybody
started have the same rss feed as the next site? Would that not be a
link back? I dont know if Bots can / would see them as a link back to
later visit? if so so RSS be No Follow, but then again I never saw a
No Follow on an RSS
Anyway, It Christmas I stop to quickly read the threads But I must get
back to the Holidays.
> Computer programs have no idea what "related" or "relevant" means.
> They can only match words. If the word "shoes" appears on both web
> pages, that adds one count to the number they call "related". To a
> human looking at the pages, they can be obviously unrelated. However,
> the search engines can't see that.
> They can look for the word "paid" but that doesn't tell them the links
> were purchased. No matter how they try to do it, the search engines
> can only count matches and set numbers to establish too many or too
> few.
OK I now think I understand why you are even asking this.
You think PR leaks through links which do not use rel="nofollow" .
Time to dispel this misunderstanding. No PR ever leaks.
PR is passed to whatever you link to when not using rel="nofollow". No
PR is leaked as in lost from the page linking out.
When using rel="nofollow" not only is there no PR being passed, but
the link that has rel="nofollow" on it is not crawled (because it is
not followed) by Googlebot (and any other robots which obey that
directive).
Notice I said the link is not crawled. It doesn't mean the page at the
end of that link won't ever get crawled. It will get crawled except
not through that particular link.
So to recap the idea of using rel="nofollow" is in order not to allow
robots to crawl out to the pages at the end of the link. The 2 effects
are that those pages will not get crawled by robots THROUGH that link
and will not receive any PR through that link.
On the inside of a website, PR also flows from one page to all pages
it links to. The page itself loses no PR, but it passes a fraction of
its own PR to other pages and that fraction may be based on how many
links are on the page. So the more links are on a page, the smaller
the bit of PR each link carries.
Now there are some that advocate isolating certain parts of your
website and use rel="nofollow" when linking to such pages in order
to distribute internal PR to fewer pages, so each page that receives
PR from another page gets a bit more of it.
But again remember no page loses any PR. Pages receive PR from
whatever page links to them as long as that link was not using
rel="nofollow".
If you consistently use re="nofollow" on ALL links to page abc.html on
your site, it will also be the same as disallowing that page in
robots.txt. Not as strong though because if there were to exist an
external link coming to that same page at www.example.com/abc.html,
as long as it's not disallowed in robots.txt, it will get crawled and
it will receive some PR through that incoming link (however minute),
but that PR comes from outside.
> Phil had a point, I believe he was asking me why I put that in an
> early above post.
> I believe he was asking for clarification to what I meant about useing
> a no
> follow on a related link to a site.
> reason: It was my mess of thoughts 5lbs shoved in a 1lb bag post,
> I tried to approach not a specific point, but a general point.
> Let me say it this way...
> When looking at how Google dislikes a page sending
> direct links to every url embedded in the code.
> Such as like farms, or a site with relative & related types of sites.
> and how it is expected that NO Follows should be used on paid links
> which have no relative & unrelated connection. That form of stopping
> major keyword terms being mass sold for money, or PR leaking.
> I read another thread of yours "relative & related " and agree that
> they are only
> matched for the word. and G would have a hard time matching "Baseball
> Bats"
> with "halloween bats". I have had Google match my site content "self
> proclaimed
> web masters" along with other non related topic "self proclaimed Moms"
> &
> "self proclaimed food aholics" Google just keyed in on text content
> only for unique
> text content which then bit me in the butt.
> ----- Please note this paragraph was hashed out, and I do not wish to
> bring that up again.
> But back to sites with no follows & related & unrelated or paid links.
> Looking at common sites like Military DOT com. they have many various
> urls which are
> the same network neigborhood. or even news article sites which have
> many articles
> pointing to outside sites.
> My general point was why do you not find any real bulk of sites using
> No Follows on
> text links, article links, paid or unpaid text links. Sure you might
> find a few here and there
> on
