Avoid bleeding Google PageRank by using rel=nofollow to user-contributed links
Any user can add links to their forum posts and blogs. All user contributed links should be rewritten with a rel=nofollow attribute. Otherwise, our valuable page rank is bled off to pages on other sites.
This should be a quick fix to add. It almost feels like a bug. Can this be added for the next release?
http://www.ssw.com.au/SSW/Standards/Rules/RulesToBetterGoogleRankings.aspx#Conserve
Gary C
shared this idea
Released in 4.4
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Dmitry Buterin commented
Gary, I have stated my current thinking above. Looking for input from other users.
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Gary C
commented
?
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Gary C
commented
This is well-documented. Nofollow is used by Google, Bing and Yahoo. People looking to boost their site page rank seek sites like these in order to siphon from them. Regardless, every link added to a comment or forum posting is definitely bleeding page rank.
This should be simple to implement but reap huge benefit. I suspect many of the WA customers do not know about this. They are trusting that WA will be doing what it can to make their site as search-engine-optimized as possible. So, there may not be a lot of direct ask.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569
If you can't or don't want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=81749 may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=81749
Together with Yahoo! and MSN, Google introduced the "nofollow" HTML microformat few years ago, and the attribute has been widely adopted. Any link with the rel="nofollow" attribute will not be used to calculate PageRank http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html or determine the relevancy of your pages for a user query. This new link will not be taken into account when calculating PageRank. This won't prevent spam, but it will avoid problems with passing PageRank. By default, many blogging sites (such as Blogger) automatically add this attribute to any posted comments.
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I am very sceptical - I suspect the Seo effect of this is extremely small if not zero for most sites on WA platform. Still, I would like to hear from other users who consider this important - please post comments here.
