Some SEO changes you can make

[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.

[Jasko]

Really interesting, thanks for sharing, I guess I will need to study more about this. I am a complete green when it comes to seo.

[jshaffstall]

Linking out to quality sites gives your site an SEO boost. Google considers Wikipedia a quality site, so nofollowing those links will have the reverse effect of what you're wanting.

Jay

[EverythingEverywhere]

No it doesn't. 100% wrong. Bad links can hurt you but good links can't help you.

If that was the case, everyone would just spam all the PR 10 and 9 sites. It would make gaming the system easy.

Your pages have a finite amount link juice. Where you spread it is up to you.

[EverythingEverywhere]

Some results:

I am working the kewords "travel blog" which is super competitive. 247,000,000 that google comes up with.

I went from page 3 to page 2 after making the "nofollow" changes.

[jshaffstall]

Originally Posted by EverythingEverywhere

Some results:

I am working the kewords "travel blog" which is super competitive. 247,000,000 that google comes up with.

I went from page 3 to page 2 after making the "nofollow" changes.

Congratulations!

What you've done with the nofollow is lower your outgoing link density. Most blogs have way too many outgoing links because of sidebar widgets.

It is still beneficial, though, to link out to sites that Google considers to be authority sites. You're, in effect, citing your sources and showing Google that your site is credible, in the same way that a research paper is credible if it cites credible sources.

What you want to nofollow are links in the sidebar like your RSS subscription, etc. Pretty much anything that appears in the sidebar that isn't an internal link or an external link you specifically want to follow (e.g. another site you own, or a site you have some sort of arrangement with).

Links in posts are meant to be follow links, unless they're to spam sites you link to as a negative example.

Jay

[EverythingEverywhere]

I still dofollow sites I link to within a post. I have no problem with that. In fact, now that I've done this, I'm sending more authority to those links than I did before.

The issue was having a ton of links in the navigation in my site that was appearing on every single page. Many of those were big sites or directories which I had no desire to send link juice to.

Because of the problems I've been having with Flickr images getting on Google Image search, I've stopped sending all link juice to Flickr. Also, they are nofollowing links from their site, so I see no reason why I shouldn't do the same to them.

Wikipedia is the same thing. They put nofollow on every external link, so I have no problem doing the same in kind.

I found a tiny plugin that nofollowed very Wikipedia link and modified it to work with Flickr.

[jshaffstall]

Originally Posted by EverythingEverywhere

I still dofollow sites I link to within a post. I have no problem with that. In fact, now that I've done this, I'm sending more authority to those links than I did before.

The issue was having a ton of links in the navigation in my site that was appearing on every single page. Many of those were big sites or directories which I had no desire to send link juice to.

You've hit on what blogs should do, and had some great results from it. Hopefully others will follow your lead.

If you ever find a plugin that nofollows everything <i>but</i> links in posts, be sure to post here about it. I've tried finding something that would make the task of doing the nofollow bit easier, and ran across only spot solutions. I'd love something with no configuration, you just activate and anything except for a link in a post is automatically nofollow, unless you specify otherwise.

Jay

[Dulcepixels]

I'm planning to "nofollow" also my other blogs but it might take me a long time to make all the changes. *Whew*

Congrats on your upgrade.

[EverythingEverywhere]

You don't want to nofollow everything, just external links. If you don't follow internal links, you are just hurting yourself.

There are plugins that do that. Just do a search of nofollow everything plugin. I think one was called the nofollow black hole or something.

One recent change I've made is I've set all trackbacks to my posts to be dofollow. If you link to my article, you get an automatic dofollow link back.