Quote:
Originally Posted by EverythingEverywhere
I went through my site and added rel="nofollow" to a ton of outbound links. In particular, every directory button, every social networking site, every wikipedia mention, and Flickr.
Why? There is no particular reason why I should give them link juice. Wikipedia especially...they "nofollow" every link on their site. So does Flickr.
I probably removed hundreds of links across all my pages. All of that which will stay in house for my PR or towards sites which I choose to give my link juice to.
This is independent of your decision to "nofollow" comments. If you "dofollow" your comments, putting "nofollow" on all the extraneous links to big sites will just send that much more link juice to your commenters.
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Ever wonder why so many directories climb. Here is an example. I rank well for tones of terms. However "Blog Directory" I used to hold page 2 strong. Now I'm page 3. Why? Easy answer; so many "Free / Reciprocal" directories out there taking EVERYONE and ANYONE that will link to them.
My problem now is consistency /velocity. You see if the engines see you growing the links with "travel blog" consistently over time they will give you more credit. I'm not growing with "blog directory" anymore because I don't do reciprocals or play those games. My directory is what it is; it's select inclusion. As a result it's hard to keep up with people adding 50-100 free blogs a day making them add "blog directory" in their sidebar. Most bloggers have no clue how these work so they are cashing in. I don't see the majority of these sites being around in the years to come.
If you started getting more relevant anchor texts "travel blogs" from other travel sites I think you'd notice you'd climb some more.
Don't feel bad about nofollowing the free directories and stuff anyways. Frankly I don't know why people even bother submitting to free directories; most of them are just link farms any way you wanna look at them and if they aren't yet. They will be. Well that's harsh. SOME do have editorial integrity. Just do a search for terms you don't want to be associated with before you submit. If you find them; move on.
The Cycles of Organic Search Engine Positioning | SEO Design Solutions
Good read.