Introduction Time. My sites are 1 month old today.

I did just think of a question. Should i be putting rel="nofollow" all on my outgoing links? as there is going to be thousands.

congrats on the nice site

Welcome to GFY

good question..

I would use them for the links to the content but not for the linktrades, anybody else got a thought about this?

Welcome

hello and welcome

Welcome!

Hey Rob.. !

On your trades no everything else yes. Here is some food for thought for you.

The no follow tag (rel="nofollow") has been adopted by Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major and minor search engines as a way to thwart spam. The no follow tag was originally created for bloggers who were being spammed in the comments area of their blogs with ads for pharmaceuticals, home loans and even adult ads.

These drive-by spammers contributed nothing to the blog but benefited from PageRank with links that pointed to their own websites. The nofollow tag simply says to a search engine to disregard this link as it is not to a 'trusted' source. The page at the other end of the no follow link will not benefit in PageRank. Most of the blog software and social services now put in the no follow tag automatically for links in the comments area.

Another area where the no follow tag is being used is on publisher websites in on the sponsored link text. Google is especially keen on this noting that sponsored links may in fact be links to bad neighborhoods and should not gain from another site's PageRank. Yahoo disagrees with this philosophy so there is a nice debate going on now about the no follow tag in regard to sponsored links.

One area where one will definitely not want to use the no follow tag is when doing reciprocal link trades. In a reciprocal link trade, you're not only trading traffic with another website but PageRank as well. If you place a no follow tag on the text link of one of your reciprocal partners, this says a couple of things.

First, it says that you don't trust the website that you're linking to enough to endorse it (so why did you make the link trade in the first place?). It also says that you're willing to cheat your partners since they are giving your website PageRank in good faith that you'll do the same and you are employing means that will deprive them of this (so your link trade its not reciprocal).

It is also important that you protect yourself from link partners who are using the no follow tag to gyp you out of a truly reciprocal link trade. Searching the source code on the link page where your link appears from time to time will help you discover if the no follow tag is being used or not.

Remember, the no follow tag is a good device when used properly, but like so many other inventions for the Web, it is prone to misuse as well.

I have never seen sponsors specify in the terms of their affiliate program that a affiliate can’t use rel="nofollow" … which actually surprises me

Any sponsors got a view on this?

just keep working...

welcome to the forum, sounds like you've had a good start

Thanks for all the info and nice comments.

Welcome...

congrats on the good start. hoping mine is as good as yours, or better