Nofollow Attribute

[xtremeoff-road]

Quick question for all of you, I currently run an IPB forum.

Is it truly beneficial to implement a modification to the forum to place the nofollow attribute to outgoing links?

Does this in fact improve SEO as well as pagerank?

I currently have an <if> statement incorporated into my forums that places a nofollow attribute after all links that point to somewhere outside my domain, however, when editing posts, has a tendency of screwing up the links.

Anyhow, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Keral_Patel]

Well It will be a problem for users who are posting to get some link juice from your forum. There are some forums that have no follow integrated and some don't have it.

EX: http://www.ozzu.com - No Follow for links
EX: http://www.namepros.com - Doesn't Yse No Follow for links

 

[xtremeoff-road]

Thanks Nick, however, I guess my question is...is it a good idea to use them?

 

[Keral_Patel]

Thanks Nick, however, I guess my question is...is it a good idea to use them?

That depends on you as a forum owner. That you want to link to the sites that your users have in signature or you don't want to link to those sites and want to lose the users who are specially posting to get some links from the forums.

 

[Ixix]

personally, i hate nofollow...

as long as ppl arnt spamming, then i see no purpose in punishing them with no link juice. They are contributing to your site and adding content....allowing them a sig w/a link or two is a great way to say thank you.

**even if** a search engine does reward forums with more traffic, i would think pleasing your current members would be more of a priority....

 

[Peter]

Isis. A link is considered as a vote for a particular site. There are of course circumstances in which you may link to a site but not wish to vote for that site.

An extreme example is say if you was reporting on a virus and linked to the virus home page. Would you really want your link to count as a vote for that site?

Or another example you are rebutting in your blog what someone else has said in theirs you may wish to post a link so that people know what you are talking about but there could be a genuine reason why you wouldn't want to give them a vote as their widely mistaken post will become better thought of by Google.

 

[whitebark]

Excellent points Peter. And it should be noted that not all search engines treat the tag exactly the same either.