G advises putting the nofollow in links: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
I’ve noticed a affiliate shopping site I manage has dropped pr down to a ‘0’ in the last 9 months, which I credit not having the nofollow in place.
The nofollow attribute won’t effect anything at all. It doesn’t change where your link points and it doesn’t affect any JavaScript.
Nofollow should have no effect on tracking of clicks or JavaScript. All nofollow does is to discard the PR that the link would pass. Since advertisin links are not allowed to pass PR if you don’t set the affiliate links as nofollow and Google find out then the pages with the links on them will be given a PR of zero so that there is no PR passed to any of the links. PR has minimal effect on the positioning of pages in search engine results and no affect on anything else.
Thank you Dan and Stephen.
Searching other shopping mall sites they seem to be using an internal redirect, (robots exclusion?). I’m wondering why they don’t employ nofollow.
I guess I could do both – internal redirect and with nofollow in the links, just to be sure, for two layers of protection. This would eliminate 90 plus outbound links on the site.
Would like to salvage the 10 yr old site, at the least, there is content value.
And its not as easy to get a new one developed these days, I know. Your probably know what I’m talking about.
Might was well redo the site and include only the handful of links that perform.
The only other question I see is that, what about having so many links going to an internal/header redirect? Could this be harmful?
If you are going to redo an existing account, just make sure original links match new content location. If you have references to the old content, just clean them up so they aren’t broken and point to the right content.
You don’t need internal redirects if you are going to point to content on the same site, just fix the links. You can rel=nofollow dead pages that you don’t feel add any value to the site, or setup a good 404 page before removing off-theme content.
Just be careful you don’t kill high value inbound links, each moved page needs a 301 redirect to the new location (easy to do with mod_rewrite in some cases), but if at all possible just improve page templates first. Have seen people really mess this up and lose some valuable inbound traffic.
Sincerely,
Justin
P. s. Too many redirects can mess up tracking if done by referrer rather than cookie – you also need to make sure that the pages that don’t perform don’t contribute to what make the other pages perform. Is the site worth getting a second opinion on before changing things?
Just be careful you don’t kill high value inbound links, each moved page needs a 301 redirect to the new location
Will the search engines transfer the inbound link value(s) to the new page being redirected to via the 301?