nofollow tags

[csnmf]

My site tends to have up to 15 unique outgoing affiliate links(these are repeated a few times on each page) on one page so i was thinking of adding nofollow tags, all the web pages i have seen show them as <a href="http://www.xyz.com" rel="no follow"> is it possible to make it <a rel="no follow" href="http://www.xyz.com"> as this would make it a thousand times easier to update across all my pages.

Also i was in the process of adding a "go" folder with redirect files in there so that i could hide my affiliate links. I edited my robots.txt file to be

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Allow: /

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" /> and added this line to the redirect file.

If i do this, do i still need to add the no follow attribute to the links to the redirect files? If i don't use the nofollow attribute would i lose some page rank to the redirect files even though i have implemented the changes to the robots file above?

Thanks

[OPC]

My site tends to have up to 15 unique outgoing affiliate links(these are repeated a few times on each page) on one page so i was thinking of adding nofollow tags, all the web pages i have seen show them as <a href="http://www.xyz.com" rel="no follow"> is it possible to make it <a rel="no follow" href="http://www.xyz.com"> as this would make it a thousand times easier to update across all my pages.

Also i was in the process of adding a "go" folder with redirect files in there so that i could hide my affiliate links. I edited my robots.txt file to be

User-agent: *
Disallow: /go/
Allow: /

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" /> and added this line to the redirect file.

If i do this, do i still need to add the no follow attribute to the links to the redirect files? If i don't use the nofollow attribute would i lose some page rank to the redirect files even though i have implemented the changes to the robots file above?

Thanks

1. Yes to <a rel="no follow" href="http://www.xyz.com">

2. If you're disallowing, there's no need to nofollow. My understanding is that google claims to not honor the nofollow meta tag, but I think they still respect the robots.txt nofollow directive. Someone else will jump in and correct me or explain better if I'm off on this one...

[pokerextras]

Out of interest, why would you want to use nofollow? You loose the juice from the links anyway, so either you dofollow and let the sites you're linking to have the juice, or you nofollow and just loose the juice. It doesn't help you so why would you do it?

[csnmf]

I am very new to this so i've been reading alot of conflicting stuff about it and i still don't know anything definitive, so i thought it wouldn't hurt to have them but i guess i won't bother doing it now if there is no benefit.

If i have the same link repeated many times on the same page does that count as just one link in terms of leakage and google recommending only 100 links per page?

[Michael Martinez]

Ignore any SEO article that talks about hoarding PageRank, sculpting PageRank, "managing link juice", or anything similar. Those are all crap ideas written by people who don't know what they are doing.

Affiliate links are a very special case in outbound linking. Most modern search engines do a pretty good job of figuring out what they are and devaluing them. You should not be doing anything to tell search engines to ignore them.

However, if you don't want your affiliate links to be used by search engines, use jump scripts that use 302-redirects to send your visitors to your merchant sites (make sure your merchant programs don't forbid this). You can use the jump scripts to create your own outbound traffic statistics to compare to your merchant reports.

[abscident]

I think that adding a folder with all your aff links is a good idea. I would still use a "nofollow" tag on the links to keep a higher value for my other links.

[pokerextras]

I think that adding a folder with all your aff links is a good idea. I would still use a "nofollow" tag on the links to keep a higher value for my other links.

that's the point though. You don't keep a higher value for your other links. You either dofollow and pass the juice on, or you nofollow and the juice disappears. You gain nothing by nofollowing.

[cprpoker]

Doesn't the amount of "juice" you pass get split equally among all followed links? If that is the case then you dillute that power by having more links than necessary.

[pokerextras]

Doesn't the amount of "juice" you pass get split equally among all followed links? If that is the case then you dillute that power by having more links than necessary.

absolutely correct. Google used to ignore the nofollow links, and share the juice between the dofollow ones. This allowed you to keep the juice on your site, and even manipulate it to certain pages in your site by nofollowing your own internal links. Because google weren't happy with this, due to their search engine positioning being based heavily on link juice, they recently announced that link juice would be spread evenly between all on page links, and any nofollow links would cause their share of the juice to disappear. This basically made nofollow totally pointless, other than to blogs to prevent spamming.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Using nofollow doesn't preserve link juice according to Matt Cutts.

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.

You can read the explanation here: PageRank sculpting