Do you use "nofollow" for your sponsor links?
 

I've seen some people using nofollow for their sponsor links, just wondering..

Do those ccbill or nats Dynamic link codes make you lose any juice at all?

.

Weight or juice is no longer SAVED by adding a nofollow attribute. It will still listen to the nofollow and not pass any juice onto that site. BUT IT WILL NOT SAVE IT and distribute it across your site.

Adding nofollow only stops you from passing weight onto the nofollowed link, but does not in ANY WAY return that juice to your pages or build up 'more' page rank or juice to your existing pages.

You gain NOTHING by running nofollow links.

Jdoughs: good info.

Is this what you actually THINK? Or did you read this from an official source?

Can you give me a link to the source saying this?

.

google it. he's right.

I do this for a living, and have so for many years.

"Think" doesn't make me money, results do.

I saw an article that had a video from some guy from google that said google basically ignores the nofollow.

Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all.

There's actually a valid reason to use nofollow on sponsor links. Namely, when you do, some of your PR (if your site has it) will pass on to them. We can assume your sponsor has many other affiliates, each passing on their PR to them.

In the end, because of their loading for the same keywords you're using, and all the PR passed to them by affiliates, your sponsor can easily outrank you on the SERPs. If you're going for SE traffic, their site may - and probably will - come up first. You won't get a dime for it, even though you (and other Webmasters) helped to build their SERPs. It's free link-building for them, plus they get to avoid paying out an affiliate fee.

While there may not be a reason to avoid nofollow when it comes to losing PR from your site, there is no reason to use it if you want to retain your positions for your money keywords. Your sponsors are your partners, but from an SE standpoint, they are also your competitors.

I've always wondered does PR get passed on to the sponsor even if they are using CCBill ie the link is http://refer.ccbill.com.... which then forwards to the sites domain?

You're not understanding.

If a page has "10" linkjuice to give and 10 links on page, none with "nofollow", all of those paged linked to would get 1 linkjuice. If you nofollow 5 of those links, guess what happens? Thanks to a change Google did several months ago, the remaining 5 links still get only 1 linkjuice each. They did publicize this change. They still encourage people to nofollow sponsor links, BUT nofollowing those and internal links to privacy policy etc. no longer sculpt pagerank.

:2 cents::thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsu p

i followed google forums for awhile. it just gave me a massive headache.

there is a downside to using nofollow on sponsor links in that you decrease your chance of having your ref code indexed and getting a top spot. these can be gold while they last.

Give me the link where google officially announced this. (don't say "google it or it's everywhere"... Give me link to what you are specifically referring to)

Otherwise, it's your humble webmaster opinion, BUT not the truth. Nothing else than that.

.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Ive seen better explanations, but Cutts is the official mouthpiece for Google SEO.

There's this one, which has a bit clearer illustrations, but it's not official Google:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-ma...ndles-nofollow

no i use my own seo friendly links

I am actually going to try this on one of my blogs. I have other blogs that have no "nofollows" but I am going to try one with almost all "nofollow" affiliate links. See what happens. Just an experiment with one blog.

Cutts is a red herring.

If you add nofollow, there is no chance of your links getting indexed. do get good signups from links that were indexed in the search engines, so I would never even consider adding nofollow to sponsor links.

you should do to your sponsor link if you don think you will get SE juice

lol, I read it "no SWALLOW" :)

:2 cents: what he said is true.

A lot of times I will get my aff links indexed in google and recieve some very very good traffic directly to that link. This more or less happens for newer programs I promote and they do seem to eventually drop out of the google index after some time.

It's better that the paysite, your sponsor, get higher listings at search engines than piracy and spam sites. Every affiliate should ensure that. You are affiliate, not competitor :)