Hi, I just joined Sitepoint and was wondering what this comment in my confirmation e-mail means…
P.S. SitePoint is a NOFOLLOW Forum. Posting only for backlinks is a waste of time.
Mike
It means that search engines do not follow any links you place in the forum.
Some people only post in forums in order to put links there for search engines to follow back to their own site. A nofollow forum is useless to those people as the search engines ignore the links.
Of course real people can still see and follow the links.
I’m not sure that I understand why they would do that?
A nofollow forum is useless to those people as the search engines ignore the links.
Of course real people can still see and follow the links.
So if I put a link to a news article or to my website or whatever, people on Sitepoint could click on the link and see whatever I posted, but search engines like Google couldn’t do something?
Sincerely,
Mike
[FONT=“Georgia”]Correct.
The search engine spiders (who obey the nofollow command) would see the link, but won’t ‘follow’ the link to where it leads.[/FONT]
[I]Sincerely,
Mike
[/I]
[FONT=“Georgia”]Noisily,
Shaun
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I was wondering guys if the members is decreasing? 
Just curious… My sister recommend me in this forums since she told me that this is one of a good forum. She’s an SEO specialist and as I remember sitepoint gives a good backlinks before…
No matter what happen I will still participate here. I love the community especially interacting with experts… 
[FONT=“Georgia”]Life caught up with a lot of us, I think.
This is the first time in a long time that I’ve been on Sitepoint so often; I used to be here twelve hours a day back when I first joined. And most of that right here in General Chat.
These days I’m being pulled in all sorts of directions, between my clients, my friends, my family. And I’m sure that’s true for a lot of the older, funner members from my time too (yeah… four years ago… ancient history…).
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So what is the purpose of these “back-links” and why do people want to create them here at Sitepoint?
Sincerely,
Mike
[FONT=“Georgia”]It’s because of the way Google works.
Google ranks websites based on the quality of the site’s content, and to guesstimate this, their spiders assume that quality content is that which has a large number of reputable links to it (the logic being that if an article is really good, people all over the 'Net will talk about and reference it, therefore a quality article/website will have lots of incoming links).
When one of Google’s users does a web-search, the quality website (the one with all the links) will appear close to the top of the search results. And that’s a good place for a website to be!
So we get spammers here, who try to artificially inflate the number of links to their content (“backlinks”) by posting fluff along with their website address.
To help combat this, the forum is “nofollow”… therefore any spamming efforts will be a waste of effort, as Google will not ‘count’ the inflated backlinks as being quality links.[/FONT]
[I]Sincerely,
Mike[/I]
[FONT=“Georgia”]Hoping that made sense,
Shaun
[/FONT]
Oops, sorry for turning this into a forum discussion!
So, it sounds like adding “nofollow” to a person’s webpages may be a good idea? Or is it not that simple?
Yes, thanks for helping me to better understand how the Internet and Google and Websites work.
Sincerely,
Mike
No problem, man. It’s a forum; that’s what it’s for.
So, it sounds like adding “nofollow” to a person’s webpages may be a good idea? Or is it not that simple?
[FONT=“Georgia”]In general you’ll want as many pages of your site as possible to be indexed, therefore internal links (that is; links pointing to other pages of your own website) you’re going to want followable.
External links, links leaving your website, you’ll in general want as nofollow; so you can grab and hold onto as much rank as you can.
–
BUT… your keywords matter too. Keywords being the words of the link…
<a href=“address”>keyword</a>
Your site isn’t ranked overall, but ranked by keyword. So if you have a site about jam, and lots of other sites about jam link to you, then it’s very likely that you’ll rank well if someone googled the word ‘jam’.
Because your site and those sites very likely have the word ‘jam’ written dozens of times all over the place.
It’d be less likely that you’d rank well for the keyword ‘oyster’.
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External links not competing with any of your own keywords, it’s no problem to leave followable. Ranking well for ‘oyster’ won’t benefit you if you’re business is only selling ‘jam’.[/FONT]
[I]Sincerely,
Mike[/I]
[FONT=“Georgia”]Greedily,
Shaun
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This mean all back links from sitepoint are helpless in SEO. So don’t try to spam to get back links
The whole “back-linking” thing sounds rather desperate to me?! :-/
I guss now I understand why you see all of these “I’ve been using <product link> for a year now, and my teeth are whiter, my love life better, and my bank account fuller…” 
It would seem to me that if you have a quality site with quality content, you wouldn’t need to come to Sitepoint pasting links to your site in the first place…
Thank you for helping me to better understand things.
Sincerely,
Mike
Making links nofollow has no effect on how much rank the other links get. Google divide the PR equally between all the links on the page, they just don’t pass on the PR for nofollow links. They used to have it where nofollow links were ignored when distributing PR but they changed it earlier this year. Anyway outgoing PR has no effect on incoming PR and never has.
The only purpose to nofollow now is to place it on user submitted links so as that people will be less likely to post junk links to dynamic pages such as forums or blogs.
[FONT=“Georgia”]I’ve heard that PR doesn’t really matter either.
Either way I don’t dwell on it. I focus on keywords and it seems to work for me so far; I always get decent ranking for the words I choose.
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Really? Sitepoint is listed on the net on many sites stating it is a “dofollow” obviously you guys know best here cause after all it is your site. Interesting though, here’s a couple articles:
getinternetmarketingstrategies.com/2008/11/do-follow-forums/
rumahabi.com/120-forums-with-dofollow-signatures.html
blogcatalog.com/topic/sitepoint/
That’s just to name 3 places. Does the 2nd link hold any truth?
:tup: interesting reading & good question OP
Laughingly,
Mizwizzy
getting back links from search engine through signature is one reason and the other is some people directly click that link to see that web page, usign that they will gain some traffic
Well, that used to be true. It became a nofollow at mid 2009 so that article isn’t true anymore… things change
Yes it does as Site point is a Dofollow Forum
Do you think by making Sitepoint a NoFollow forum it will decrease users wanting to sign up, or only decrease users that are wanting to spam? Is there any other benefits of making it NoFollow, aside from the potential people coming here to spam?