Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 5713 Location: by the beach, Australia
Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 8:10 am Post subject: Rel="nofollow" in our forum links
We've added rel="nofollow" to all links on this forum.
Here's the reason...
Our site rankings took a serious hit in a Google algorithm change in mid-August. This is really unusual for us. Normally when algorithm changes occur, we end up doing better than previously. Not this time, though.
With search engine optimization, it's often difficult coming to hard and fast conclusions about causes because there are so many possible factors to consider. We've researched the issue, and I suspect that we've passed some sort of tipping point from being a trusted site to being a less trustworthy site. We strongly suspect that the cause is a large number of links from our site to "bad neighborhoods".
As an experiment, we've added rel="nofollow" to all links in the forum and in the affiliate directory. As I'm sure you know, such links won't pass PageRank.
If this change upsets you, I'm sorry. We felt it was was necessary if we wanted to improve our standing in Google's eyes. After all, Google has been saying for a long time that webmasters should use rel="nofollow" on links that aren't trusted. I don't want to insult anyone, but we had many thousands of links we weren't sure about.
I imagine most of our favorite forum members aren't here just in an attempt to get PageRank. I hope not. We'll soon see!
It will be very interesting to see how this change affects rankings, traffic, and use of the forum. _________________ Allan Gardyne
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Joined: 11 Oct 2006 Posts: 57 Location: Biloxi, MS
Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 2:36 am Post subject:
Allan
It takes courage to do this and that's why you are one of only a handful of mentors that count to me.
You may take a hit on numbers of forum participants but the cream always rises to the top and those who are truly here to learn and share will continue to contribute. The ones that were here for back links, well what can you say about those people anyway? They will move on to some other forum like any other "street walker".
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