To Follow or Unfollow Links and Why It Matters

A member asks, “I’m listing a 2 to 4 useful links on most of my site’s pages (mostly to government websites). Should I be making them nofollow or dofollow?”

At first, the consensus to not bother with no-follow links. But then…

I had 4 links on that site to external sites. Google thought those 4 links were paid links. They weren’t. Well, actually 2 were, but they were image ads, not text links. The other 2 were text links, but were not paid links. I’d always been under the impression that Google understood image ads were ads. I was wrong about that. In any case, Google slapped me with a PageRank penalty.

What to do for your site? Discussion: Should I Attach Nofollow To Good External Links?

Back Links 101

Regardless of whether you actively chase backlinks or simply let them come to you as, when, if they will there are some things to keep in mind.

The first is that there must be somewhere to point to. Obvious, right? But what if the link has an error? If it gets the domain wrong there is little one can do except contact the webdev at the referring site – if and when you notice. If it gets the domain right but has a subsequent error there are several ways to ‘make it right’:
—create an optimised custom 404 page as default failover.

—institute Apache mod_speling module or similar.

—regularly parse and sort log files for most critical/frequent backlink URL errors then add specific redirects to httpd.conf or htaccess (Apache), ISAPI_Rewrite or URL Rewrite Module (MSFT).

—contact referer requesting correction (if worth effort. Note: some SE values may be dampened or otherwise affected by redirection).

Read more or join in the discussion….Back Links 101