Using rel="nofollow" attribute in affiliate links
Submitted by webaurora on Sun, 01/28/2007 - 18:39.
There seem to be opposite opinions regarding effectiveness of rel="nofollow" attribute in affiliate links. Some SEO's strongly recommend to use it as, they say, it prevents website's PR leak and stops search engine from penalizing affiliate sites; other "guru" say, to the contrary, sites with many rel="nofollow"s will be penalized, and search engines may even stop crawling the page having stumbled on such link :shock:
What do you think about efficiency of this attribute, guys?
Thanks
Using rel="nofollow" attribute in affiliate links
I've been wondering myself. If you choose to use these tags, just don't over do it as you'll be flagged for funneling PR. If I use them, I'll only use 2 -3 per a page. That's just what I do.
I really don't know what effect they have, but I do know that if you have great content that you can still get ranked high. For example, even the big guys using nofollow links. Yahoo Answers uses them on all outgoing source links, but I still have content there that gets high rankings. The main thing is that you should be creating trust with the SE's. If they trust you, whether these tags harm you or not shouldn't be an issue.
Charles
Using rel="nofollow" attribute in affiliate links
As a rule of thumb use the nofollow attribute on any link that can be considered advertising. If you're linking to a site because you think it's worthwhile than use an organic link. Google will not penalize you for such outbound links. You only get into trouble when you link to bad neighborhoods (spammers, webrings, etc.)