nofollow affiliate links

[alexcruncha]

I have recently been reading a lot about the nofollow tag and it seems I am missing a trick here and realised that I have possibly 100 or so outbound links from my site that are NOT nofollow tagged.

Is there any reason I shouldnt make all my affiliate links nofollow?

I have looked at the source on some top portals and it seems they inconsistently use nofollow here and there.

[baldidiot]

As far as I am aware there is no benefit to nofollow'ing affiliate links.

Google realised a while ago that people were using no follow tag to attempt to manipulate page rank and so made a fairly significant change to their algorithm. With regards to PR flow, the PR of a page is divided by all links regardless of follow or nofollow status, but PR is only passed through links without the nofollow tag. PR associated with nofollow links is simply lost from the page.

There's a video somewhere with Matt Cutts discussing the change, I'll see if I can hunt it out.

[baldidiot]

From Matt Cutts' blog: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. Nofollow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext[*].

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.

[baldidiot]

This was also in the same article, found it interesting:

[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed.

[Online-casinos.co.uk]

Whilst it's no longer important for pagerank sculpting, imagine the boost to the affiliate sites in the search engines if every affiliate link was made no follow....

[AWH-Gemma]

You might want to take a look at the thread here https://www.gpwa.org/forum/nofollow-...light=nofollow

[alexcruncha]

As far as I am aware there is no benefit to nofollow'ing affiliate links.

Google realised a while ago that people were using no follow tag to attempt to manipulate page rank and so made a fairly significant change to their algorithm. With regards to PR flow, the PR of a page is divided by all links regardless of follow or nofollow status, but PR is only passed through links without the nofollow tag. PR associated with nofollow links is simply lost from the page.

There's a video somewhere with Matt Cutts discussing the change, I'll see if I can hunt it out.

....so Baldidiot what you and Matt Cutts article quoted in a reply above is saying is that setting all my affiliate links to nofollow actually provides no benefit since the algorithm has been changed. I understand that if I want to increase (sculpt) PR on a page the only way to do so would be to reduce the number of external links per page since nofollow links are now counted by Google when calculating that page's PR... although they just dont pass the link juice on to the linked site.

In my excitement when I first believed nofollow would allow me to sculpt the PR on my site I quickly changed all affiliate links to nofollow. I now believe I should change them back, after all what nofollow is there to state is that this link cannot be trusted and with an affiliate site it is the exact opposite... in fact with an affiliate site we are telling people that this site can be trusted please spend some money here, right?

Also, I read somewhere that linking to good sites is actually good for your site!

I think I am going to do away with nofollow links... but that now takes me to another point... do you lose PR through Flash based banners or links shown through an iframe? They are external affiliate links but does Google count them? If I can do away with all 100 external affiliate links on my site and replace them with Flash based ads or on a non-indexed page in an iframe that must be better right? If I remove all external links and make an iframe which points to a non indexable page that contains my external affiliate links then this reduces the number of on page external links right?

I'm sure there is something I can do to optimise my site, over having all these external links embedded on my site.

[baldidiot]

I think I am going to do away with nofollow links... but that now takes me to another point... do you lose PR through Flash based banners or links shown through an iframe? They are external affiliate links but does Google count them? If I can do away with all 100 external affiliate links on my site and replace them with Flash based ads or on a non-indexed page in an iframe that must be better right? If I remove all external links and make an iframe which points to a non indexable page that contains my external affiliate links then this reduces the number of on page external links right?

I'm sure there is something I can do to optimise my site, over having all these external links embedded on my site.

That's an interesting idea, I wonder if anybody has ever experimented with it.