Over a year ago, search engines came out with the rel="nofollow"
to be used on links that were sold or to sites you did
not 100% trust. This nofollow would tell the search
engine to ignore that link, not pass anchor strength,
and PR in google's case. When this one came out, it
bothered me cause I had some sold ads on my game site,
and who would pay for an ignored link.I did not feel
like getting problems with this, so I stopped renewing
the link sales till all were removed off my site, so
about four months after. Then Google made this nofollow
rule official and even added a link in the webmastertool
to report sold links. I already fixed the sold links/ads
issue, but had some link exchanges and a few one way to
my brother, sister and a few friend sites. I stopped
doing link exchanges around the Florida update.
I rarely monitored my link pages and the backlinks,
but then saw a post on DazzlinDonna,s blog, seoscoop,
about not getting a penalty lifted. Matt Cutts pointed
some links that she forgot and were not nofollowed, she
fixed that and boom... all is fixed. I had a look at
the few links pages I had on my sites, and beside one
site, all had a grey PR. This site here had automated
link pages, but I did not make the ASP code and was not
getting it fixed to have the "nofollow" added. A handful
of pages were not in the supplemental index... so I
trashed all the site, moved it to a linux box addon
domain.
Google did not miss a single page that had links on
my sites, except the oldest one. All pages were fine on
it, had good PR and cached often. Maybe it was
considered as a trusted site and it's links were not
tossed, or it's just that it had not been visited yet. I
tossed a few K$/year of sold links to prevent
problems from this "sold links hunt", am I going to keep
exchanged or free links on my sites.... Sorry.
Not sure this was a good move from Google to do this,
I mean publicly displaying that you'd get penalized for
not using nofollow. I mean, you link out to a bad
neighborhood site, you get whacked, you don't use a
nofollow, you get whacked. What stops anyone from
finding a page with a link to a site that is not
obviously not sold, report it in the webmastertool and
wham. I prefer to kill what google uses as a metrics to
gauge sites, than have to worry about stuff like that,
so bye-bye links.
A link is a vote, but if you vote even honestly, you
risk getting a beating if the algo decide to raise a
flag, or the auditor at google did not have his cup of
coffee that morning and bash honest given real vote
links. Webmasters are always snooping around looking for
stuff and often, know a lot more than most about their
industry. But some webmasters, like me, will not put the
real votes to what they consider a good resource site,
if there is a risk of getting a beating... why risk your
stuff to give a link.
Anyway, that's my thought on the subject. I stopped
developing links end 2003, except the automated ones,
and just played with my directory that I trashed last
week. My stuff is not based on sold, exchanged, 3-way...
links. So I'm not going to mess around with links to
sites that may get me to waste time fixing the issue,
even if I can show they are legit, I'd be wasting time.
If some were useful, they aren't anymore, and won't be
used as a metric for google or any other search engine.
I'm not going to use nofollow because I know I will
forget one eventually...
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