Google and rel=nofollow links

Looks like Google is playing fast and loose with page ranking again.  They are planning to start being even stricter on nofollow links.  Instead of now just dinging those they "think" are paid links they'll be dinging outgoing product links on reviews.  Beginning to look like adding the nofollow code on all outgoing links is the best policy to avoid the wrath of the know nothing but assume everything Google minions.

Matt Cutts was waffling yesterday about Penguin 2.0.   I watched it, but it just sounded like a huge pile of post-digestion bovine waste matter.  So I yelled obscenities at the screen and went to explore something less scare-mongering instead.

Liz - Simon knows for sure, but I think we've been doing this for quite a while already.

Hmm, we currently don't place nofollow on every external link. It certainly wouldn't hurt concerning Google - Wikipedia does that! However, a lot of our authors really care about follow link, so ... :-/ It's a bit hard to tell, if it would be an improvement concerning SEO for Wizzley.

Since Follow links are only of use (I think) to pass some authority from one place to another, and considering that not much of that is passed anyway, my view would be that setting all outgoing links to Nofollow would have little impact on those that write here. Do you even know how much authority each of your articles has?

Just to get things in perspective:

this does not mean that traffic could not pass along the link (we should always think about traffic rather than gaming Google!). It merely means that search engines would not track through and pass authority to the receiving linked content. The linking content would therefore keep all of the authority it had built up to date - possibly a better situation than with Dofollow.

Do you really want to pass some of your kudos / authority on to the likes of Amazon (who already have enough!)?

Anybody got any specific reason why to keep Dofollow links?

I agree :-)

Anyways, we put nofollow on *all* advertising links, like Amazon or eBay ... That's actually what Google tells us to do - and it's right of course, since we don't link to Amazon, because we enjoy reading their content so much ;-)

T'other place I write for has nofollow links as standard, enforced from above by the site owner.

It might cut down on spamalicious free-linking to anything of vague and possible relation to the article, I suppose. Otherwise, am no fussed wither ways so long as my article list well with the great Google Gods.

"Anybody got any specific reason why to keep Dofollow links?" (humagaia)

I do. Not one, at least seven reasons.

I think Wizzley is fine with dofollow and nofollow ratio at the moment and I like the idea of passing some authority (yep, I am checking it for every single article on the web I write). It is clear search engines like this idea too. This actually helps them ranking pages in better order and we read and even write some of this pages!

Few of good reasons for keeping dofollow:

- nofollow or dofollow have nothing to do with keeping the authority on the site (every link counts), so giving a default tag on every outgoing link will not help keeping authority 'at home' (spammers are discouraged from Wizzley with manual approval of five articles and this works great at the moment)

- sites with only nofollowed links are sites screaming: "I don't trust sites I am linking to." or "I am affiliate!" or "I can't control my links!): neither of this is a good sign of authority

- dofollow and nofollow links are normal mix in the world of internet and it is only fair to pass some authority to the site you are talking about (affiliate and paid links are exception and Wizzley covers that by the book) - again - you can't lock the authority on any page with noffolow tags, you can do that only if you don't use links and page without links is just not internet page

- interlinking; I know keyword research experts will disagree with me (I am weak in this area), but I achieved some pretty good results with interlinking between different dofollow pages and when Squidoo switched on nofollow, some of my positions on pages getting links from my Squidoo pages dropped (but Squidoo pages lost even more!)

- comparison with Wikipedia is not good, I even heard Google asked them to pass at least some of the massive authority they have (thanks to dofollow links they are getting from real people) to their sources (and this would be fair, because pretty good part of Wikipedia is actually copy-pasted from these sources which are unfairly overtaken by Wikipedia in rankings)

- I for example pass some of authority from Wizzley to my blogs and my blogs return some of this authority back to Wizzley; if Wizzley puts nofollow on links pointing to my blogs, these will not get any authority, so it could not return any, but Wizzley would still loose authority, so this is actually loose-loose situation

- several sites lost quite a few good writers with switching on nofollow in last months, please don't do that here:)

If Wizzley intends to become a storage of landing pages with strictly sales orientation, addition of default nofollow will not have direct impact on anything. But in my opinion SE are not very happy with 100% affiliate sites which act as middle men and they tend to treat them as unnecessary noise. In long term they will erase them.

If Wizzley wants to look like source of information and community of real people nofollow is probably not a good choice.

I hope I presented my case clear enough!