Follow Or No Follow | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

Any site that you link to (for reference only) and don't want to pass along any of your "linking juice," you make them no follow by adding rel="nofollow" in the html. Below is an example.

Also, check us out on <a href="http://twitter.com/BlogMyMoney" rel="nofollow">Twitter</a> or <a href="http://www.facebook.com/MyPersonalFinanceJourney" rel="nofollow">Facebook</a>. Thanks for visiting! Keep on learning!

Yeah! A lot to consider! That's an interesting idea though JD. I didn't know that do-follow links to high quality sites will actually help your own site's rankings.

For the most part you shouldn't have much reason to no follow a link. For the most part being that what you link to in your articles is a source you trust.

For example, if I link to a WSJ that should be a regular link. To nofollow it would seem like I didn't trust the link or I was trying to manipulate "link juice."

There are articles out there that argue the benefits of nofollowing (or dofollow) your comments, archives, tags, etc…

Other than whatever Wordpress does automatically, I've only nofollowed a couple of image banners that are advertisements and I think that's it. If I think a link can be helpful to the readers I don't see why I should nofollow it. Nofollow is a hack IMO.

I never had any link juice, so I never had to worry about it.

Jeffrey Trull said:

From a post on Smart Passive Income, you should no-follow the following:

 

• All affiliate links you use; each and every one of them (Although he later brings up “hiding” affiliate links as a better option).
• The links to your RSS feeds, twittercounter, and all social links should be nofollowed too.
• The privacy policy link in the footer of the site should be nofollowed except on the homepage.

Here's the full story: smartpassiveincome.com/seo-mistakes/

Thanks for posting that link. I was guilty of a few of those mistakes!

What does hiding affiliate links mean? That sounds like something kind of black hat. I've heard of people no-following them but personally I'm going to leave them the way they are. The way I see it I add an affiliate link because I think it's something valuable, not just cause I want people to click so I can get a few cents. I'd link to many of these products even without the affiliate.

Ah ok I got you. I don't have any of tthese sort of links. All of my affiliate programs currently link to the actual product, with a referral tag at the end or something like that. What you're saying makes sense and in that case I would probably put the nofollow.

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

Kevin, The affiliate links are not your links OR the product's direct link. For example if you are linking to mint.com the affiliate link will not be mint.com, it will be linkshare.com/blah or tracklink.com/abcd.. why would you want to give your link love to linkshare or commisionjunction or flexoffers…whoever you are using? If the product is useful and you link it to mint.com, then I don't think you have to do anything specific, it is the middleman's link everyone is talking about.

I personally find it unethical if a site intentionally tries to deceive me that a link is not an affiliate when it is, such as say the link appears as "www.amazon.com/book" when it really has an affiliate tag. I also believe it goes against the terms of service of some affiliate providers.

I have no idea if it's considered black hat to do this or not, though. I think there's a middle ground like the /go that I've seen on other sites, which is clearly affiliate link though does not display the actual referral code.

TightFistedMiser said:

Hiding affiliate links is not black hat.  There are several good reasons to do so. The biggest reason is to keep people from stealing.  Also some people won't click on an affiliate link that looks like an affiliate link but they will click on a cloaked link.  Some people think that Google penalizes you if you have too many affiliate links on your site.  I'm skeptical of that but it is another possible reason to hide your links.