Should Any External Links Be D0F0ll0w?

ramtripper

ramtripper

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Hey,

I checked my external links on my homepage and found that 7 were d0follow and 4 were not.

Should i switch all to n0f0ll0w?

Is this going to benefit my PR (which currently is nonexistent because of some weird google glitch, lol) or will it hurt it, or neither?
 
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I don't think it takes away from your pr - the question is how much it gives others..
 
Makes no difference. A nofollow outgoing link loses you just as much PR as a d0f0low outgoing link. The only difference is the receiving website doesn't receive PR.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let's leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn't count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
Click to expand...
So unless you absolutely hate the places you are linking to, you might as well make them all d0follow. Either that or completely remove the link alltogether if you want to conserve your pagerank.
 
if they are directing toward your content or profiles then its ok, otherwise apply the nofollow attribute.
 
phpbuilt said:
Makes no difference. A nofollow outgoing link loses you just as much PR as a d0f0low outgoing link. The only difference is the receiving website doesn't receive PR.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

So unless you absolutely hate the places you are linking to, you might as well make them all d0follow. Either that or completely remove the link alltogether if you want to conserve your pagerank.
Click to expand...

well, then another question:

Although u say that putting external links means I am giving away PR, does it really mean I am also LOSING Pr?

If this is true, then having less external links is good for my PR.

But having less external links is also bad, as I understood from reading this from for a year now. This is due to the fact that Google likes to see that your site isn't selfish and wants to spread information - aka - not a dead end for the crawler...

So how much PR am I losing by adding external links (roughly, since obviously no one has a formula) and am I gaining anything in ranking by adding external links?

If adding external links gives me ranking and costs me PR, I'll obviously be fine with that.
 
ramtripper said:
well, then another question:

Although u say that putting external links means I am giving away PR, does it really mean I am also LOSING Pr?

If this is true, then having less external links is good for my PR.
Click to expand...

Yes and no. No, you're not losing any PR from your website. However, your website has only so much PR it can pass along to others. So -- yes, you are losing PR because the PR your site is passing along could have been going to another website or web2.0 that you own (or deep links on the same domain), where you reclaim the PR, recycle it around and compound it.

So lets say you have a PR6 website, and you link out to 15 other websites and they all become PR5 each. Your PR6 website didn't lose any PR ... but those 15 PR5 websites can either be owned by you or owned by someone else, and if they're owned by someone else I guess you can say you lost PR.

ramtripper said:
But having less external links is also bad, as I understood from reading this from for a year now. This is due to the fact that Google likes to see that your site isn't selfish and wants to spread information - aka - not a dead end for the crawler...
Click to expand...

You asked how much PR you would be losing -- but PR isn't the only factor at work. I believe when you link out to authority websites, it helps define your website's niche and establishes you as a quality portal, so although you are not gaining in "PR", you're gaining in defining your site as an authority site. So there is a trade-off.

Personally, I have absolutely no problem giving out d0follow links to quality sources left and right from my authority sites (even if they are competition). I gain more than they gain.

PR is just one factor and quite frankly -- in and of itself it doesn't make that big of a difference. I used to be super PR hungry, I created elaborate scripts that hunted down sources of PR, found myself many abandoned high PR websites -- even an abandoned PR6. Funneling all that PR through my sites doesn't seem to make that big of a difference (some, but not that big).
 
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ramtripper said:
well, then another question:

Although u say that putting external links means I am giving away PR, does it really mean I am also LOSING Pr?

If this is true, then having less external links is good for my PR.

But having less external links is also bad, as I understood from reading this from for a year now. This is due to the fact that Google likes to see that your site isn't selfish and wants to spread information - aka - not a dead end for the crawler...

So how much PR am I losing by adding external links (roughly, since obviously no one has a formula) and am I gaining anything in ranking by adding external links?

If adding external links gives me ranking and costs me PR, I'll obviously be fine with that.
Click to expand...
thats why the external links are set as nofollow to restrict the pr and to let the crawlers move forward.
 
Sometimes I put a do-follow link to a relevant wikipedia article. It was speculated that this has an SEO benefit, but not sure if it's effective - looks legitimate though.
 
and i was always wondering how blog networks worked... wow ok, thank you very much for that much needed explanation. rep and thanks given.

also, im not PR hungry, im SERP hungry. but i wouldn't mind pushing my site to a pr of 5+ because then i can sell some links for a monthly fee, and in the financial niche, these links can be a very good source of income, and since im pr 3 now, i have a chance of getting somewhere with it.

phpbuilt said:
Yes and no. No, you're not losing any PR from your website. However, your website has only so much PR it can pass along to others. So -- yes, you are losing PR because the PR your site is passing along could have been going to another website or web2.0 that you own (or deep links on the same domain), where you reclaim the PR, recycle it around and compound it.

So lets say you have a PR6 website, and you link out to 15 other websites and they all become PR5 each. Your PR6 website didn't lose any PR ... but those 15 PR5 websites can either be owned by you or owned by someone else, and if they're owned by someone else I guess you can say you lost PR.



You asked how much PR you would be losing -- but PR isn't the only factor at work. I believe when you link out to authority websites, it helps define your website's niche and establishes you as a quality portal, so although you are not gaining in "PR", you're gaining in defining your site as an authority site. So there is a trade-off.

Personally, I have absolutely no problem giving out d0follow links to quality sources left and right from my authority sites (even if they are competition). I gain more than they gain.

PR is just one factor and quite frankly -- in and of itself it doesn't make that big of a difference. I used to be super PR hungry, I created elaborate scripts that hunted down sources of PR, found myself many abandoned high PR websites -- even an abandoned PR6. Funneling all that PR through my sites doesn't seem to make that big of a difference (some, but not that big).
Click to expand...
 
I personally nofollow all links except for websites I like or want to push value to.
 
Abstroose said:
Sometimes I put a do-follow link to a relevant wikipedia article. It was speculated that this has an SEO benefit, but not sure if it's effective - looks legitimate though.
Click to expand...

I do this as well. Read it somewhere that its supposed to help, not sure it if does or not, but it cant hurt.
 
So what, if you are passing away PR... I think that hardly matters.
Look at the other side of the coin... If your website is a content rich website and ********... There are tonne of websites across the web that would die to link to your website.

This increases your number of organic backlinks and boost rankings.
 
I do this...
When I like the site I m linking, I let it be ********... if I don't like the site, or don't have any feeling whatsoever, I let it NoFollow...
 
The only do-follow links on your website shall be links for other pages from that website...
 
There is only one useful use of nofollow. That is -- when you nofollow a link on your own website. When I say website, I mean the same domain -- not even differing subdomains.

Why? When you are nofollowing internal links is the only time the link gets totally dropped off the link graph. You can use nofollow effectively on your own website to control the flow of pagerank where you want it to go.

Nofollow is NOT efficient in controlling pagerank loss flowing off your website to other websites. Let me repeat that because there still seems to be many confused people in the thread -- if you nofollow from your website to another website, you are NOT conserving pagerank. Every little drop of pagerank you would have lost by using a d0follow link is equally lost when using a nofollow link. Again it is all in that link I referenced earlier in this thread.
 
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