Watching Google
December 15, 2005 – 1:31 am
I've been reading up on a few sites in the past few days concerning inbound and outbound links. At the moment Google is mainly targetting paid for links in to your site, and it seems if you have a lot of these off a dodgy network you'll get penalised for it. However over at Matt Cutt's Blog he's now beginning to talk more and more about text links regardless of paid for or not. With a couple of my AIS sites consisting of a links directory (bearing in mind they are Portals so designed to have links to do with the subject at hand) I've decided that the next updates I do to both sites will be to add
rel="nofollow"
Into all of the outbound links. Why? Well to be fair no one has paid for those links, some were pulled in automatically on creation of the site, a few I added manually, so why should I push the spiders in their direction? Secondly those links are there for visitors and not spiders anyhow, so I don't actually want the spiders going elsewhere, especially as those sites could push me down the rankings! So when I'm bored tomorrow (soon after I start work I'm sure) I'll be adding that little additional code into my external links. At least I won't do any potential damage to the sites I'm linking to nor will I do any damage to my own site. Whilst it may not affect things at present I'm pretty sure things may change soon. Google is currently sending over 400 times more traffic to my site than the 2nd place engine (MSN I believe), so I don't want to annoy them!
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