Catch-22 with incoming links

[oregontapir]

Hi,

Can I make a ref="nofollow" at page level that excludes following only
to a given domain or multiple domains? Did I see that somewhere?
Here's the scoop. Explanations first, more questions nearer the end.

It looks like Google's Webmaster Tools has a new tool or one I haven't
seen before, where you can look at every incoming link and go to the
source. (Yeah, I've been out of the loop on checking these things for
awhile - I have religiously checked the broken links, and they are
down from the 200+ last year to an average of 3 to 6 at a time, mostly
up to 10 or 11 years old or links that may have been down temporarily
due to server glitches and actually do work). I'm hoping the old
broken ones will drop away. So, that was my focus.

Now I'm looking at the incoming links. I have 3590 external links
coming into the whole site. I actually think correcting my old code
with errors that I still have on the less-used parts of my site should
be priority, and checking all of the incoming links will be a huge
task, so I'd like some advice. 269 of my pages have been linked to,
with a few pages being very popular and a few having 1 to 30 or so.
1696 are to my home page, 576 are to my tapir main page (about the
actual animals), 85 are to my gift shop main page and a whole lot of
them are to my various product pages. Webado gave me the hint that
incoming from blogs and eBay can be risky, though not always. This
could be a big problem if I can't "nofollow" specific domains.

I haven't investigated the linked-from sources thoroughly yet, but I'm
starting that process. Briefly, the 3590 pages seemed overwhelming
before my decaf and breakfast this morning, so I looked at a page that
had 2 incoming. It was my site map page. The two incoming links were
from one blog. The blog itself seemed harmless, it was a typical blog
about somebody's reaction to the world and the web, but there was a
humorous poem and a mention of "look at the weird stuff some people
are up to these days" that were both definitely not "kiddie safe." One
of the links was to a s*x site and the poem (posted on a different
day) used f* words. (Are the asterisks silly? I don't wan to junk up
your group with words that may be banned, or maybe I'm being
paranoid.) But the post on the blog that was linking to me was simply
about people who collect toy animals, and "hey, if you want to see
some interesting animals, look at this site" (which happened to be
mine). Anyway, perhaps the incoming links from this blog should be
nofollowed, as it goes to a page with only 2 incoming links but that
page is my site map page! I CAN'T IMAGINE NOFOLLOWING MY ENTIRE SITE
MAP PAGE. And what about the 1696 links coming into my home page, and
all the links to my product pages? Many of these are from blogs. I
have a site that people use a lot to illustrate their thoughts and
interests. That's supposed to be a good thing!

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Sheryl

[webado]

Sheryl, rel="nofollow" is to be added to a link at a time.
It goes in the a tag and applies just to that link:

<a href="http://example.com/blahblah.html" rel="nofollow">Blah blah</
a>

If you add a robots meta tag to the page which specifies "nofollow" it
aplies to all links from that page:

The robots meta tag we are concerned with can have these values:
1. <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
green light to everyhting (the default, so superfluous to use)

2. <meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />
index this page but don't go though any of its outgoing links

3. <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
don't index this page but crawl out the links

4. <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
don't bother with this page at all

Whether or not there are links to your pages out there on other sites
which you find distasteful, dont' worry about them. They cannot hurt
you. At worst they contribute nohting and at best they give your page
a boost.

You dont' add a noindex and/or nofollow meta tag to yoour own pages
because of external incoming links. You may want to add a nofollwo
meta tag because you are concerned that sites YOU are linking to from
that page may not be trusted or should not be trusted or are paid
links you sold to those sites. A noindex meta tag can be used to keep
a certain page out of the robots altogether (I do it for my contact
page and my order page).

[Sheryl Todd]

Wow, did I get that backwards! Thanks for clarifying and showing me the variations. We talked about nofollows on pictures before. Now I'm confused as to what the point was if the links that could cause trouble are the outgoing ones. I did put nofollows on the links from my own blog to my web site. Is there any value in that?

 

Bad Neighborhoods had some cautions about links from blogs to my pages (possible blog spam) and from eBay to my pages. I think I've fixed that also. Not that most of the actual pages linked from were a problem. There were three that they thought were suspect, and I think I've dealt with those, too. I'm still confused because Bad Neighborhoods thinks that incoming links from blogs and maybe big advertising pages could be harmful, if I understand that correctly.

 

I may be too tired today to be sensible. I guess I need to survey the outgoing links and of course the old code that's not cleaned up.

 

Thanks.

 

Sheryl

 

 

 

 

webado <web...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sheryl, rel="nofollow" is to be added to a link at a time.
It goes in the a tag and applies just to that link:

Blah blaha>

If you add a robots meta tag to the page which specifies "nofollow" it
aplies to all links from that page:

The robots meta tag we are concerned with can have these values:
1.

green light to everyhting (the default, so superfluous to use)

2.

index this page but don't go though any of its outgoing links

3.

don't index this page but crawl out the links

4.

Fund
http://www.tapirback.com/tapirgal/
Member, IUCN/SSC Tapir Specialist Group

Tapirs Google Group and E-mail List:
http://groups.google.com/group/tapirs

orego...@yahoo.com
ta...@tapirback.com
(503) 325-3179 . (503) 338-8646

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

[webado]

Actually Bad Neighbourhood isnt' looksing at incoming links, but at
outgoing links from yrou site.

You linke to site A which may be a bad site.
Or you linek to site A which links to site B which may be a bad site.

And so on.

How good you are is determined in part by how good the site you links
to are, and it has a bit of a cascading effect.

"Tell me who your friends are so I can tell you who you are" kind of
thing.

"Birds of a feather flock together".

That's why if you link out to osme site you are not sure about, use
rel="nofollow" on that link.

Your blog using rel="'nofollow" for the link to yrou regular site
tells robots visiting the blog not to crawl out that link, so that
links is also not going to be counted as an incoming links to your
site. It will pass no value from the blog to your site. I'd not have
done that, really unless you've been spamming yrou own blog with a
profusin of links to your regular site ;)

The worst that can happen is the link from the blog to the site will
not get counted. Thsi would almost surely happen if the site also has
a link back to the blog - so they end up cancelling each other out.

> Sheryl Todd
> President
> Tapir Preservation Fundhttp://www.tapirback.com/tapirgal/

> Member, IUCN/SSC Tapir Specialist Group
>
> Tapirs Google Group and E-mail List:http://groups.google.com/group/tapirs
>

> oregonta...@yahoo.com

> ta...@tapirback.com
> (503) 325-3179 . (503) 338-8646
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?

> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection aroundhttp://mail.yahoo.com- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Sheryl Todd]

Well, thanks again. I think I have it clear now  :)  Somewhow I thought they were incoming link reports from Bad Neighborhood! I was pretty rattled about my pix disappearing when I looked at it. I have a few incoming links from my blogs which I consider organic. Yeah, I thought the blog would help people find me, but I don't think I have enough links to call it spam.

 

Thanks! Back to code checking for now.

 

Sheryl

Sheryl Todd
President
Tapir Preservation Fund
http://www.tapirback.com/tapirgal/
Member, IUCN/SSC Tapir Specialist Group

Tapirs Google Group and E-mail List:
http://groups.google.com/group/tapirs

orego...@yahoo.com