NoFollow in forum is good or what?

[Seleno]

HI there
i noticed that much sites added the Nofollow in their site and forums
even a site i want to buy banner in,they want to add NoFollow in my banner, and they told me that if they follow my link their rank will be bad in google!!

what do you see about nofollow?
i'm not adding it in my forum,even i follow the members profile

so if i have much links in my forum as members signature and other sites....will google see my forum as bad forum coz members adding links and links on images?

what should i do for better google rank ?
i have about 54000 pages indexed in google
waiting your help about nofollow

[Joe Ward]

All links on your site allow for a flow of PageRank from your page, that could otherwise be conserved if they were not there.

nofollow is an instruction for the search engines, not to follow the link. The goal in using it for SEO is to conserve and better distribute PageRank to more important pages.

vBSEO has nofollow related features for both internal and external links (see your vbseocp.php control panel).

You should definitely nofollow dynamic links and sorting links (see nofollow for internal links in vbseocp), especially if you do NOT have a robots.txt file blocking the search engines from crawling these.

Whether or not to use them on your member profile page is up to you. Some forum admins feel that their members deserve some exposure for their links. Others do not feel that it is largely important for their members, and nofollow them instead.

Then we also have nofollow for external links, with a whitelist and blacklist.

You don't want to block ALL external links for sure. Your forum should not be a dead-end. It should have some links into the Internetwork. However, these links should be relevant.

It is possible for you to adopt a strategy of adding nofollow for all external links, except a particular whitelist of highly relevant sites that you have pre-selected.

This is up to you in terms of what you prefer to do with your SEO strategy.

My strategy would be to block as many non-relevant links as possible, ensuring that the search engines are crawling through to only my most relevant pages (or relevant external sites) thereby improving the efficiency of PageRank conservation and distribution.

[Seleno]

thanx Jeo Ward
some ppl say that if you NoFollow the members profile,you'll give more chance for google to see your forum threads

any way i don't care for it that much,but some one told me that much links in my forum with follow will make my forum lose pagerank and google will see it as spam

so do you think it will effect?
and do you recommend me to use NOFollow for links in signature and in threads?
i want the best

[Joe Ward]

Personally, yes. I would add nofollow to signature links as well as member profile page links.

[Seleno]

thanx Joe Ward
so how can i add NoFollow to signature?
and if i add nofollow for member profile,will this help google to follow my forum threads better?
how can i add Nofollow for members profile also?

about the reads,much users post links,but in digitalpoints they don't add NoFollow

[Joe Ward]

To nofollow signature links consider:
vBSEO Conditional Signatures - Search Engine Optimization Plugin - vBulletin.org Forum

To nofollow member profile links, find the options to do so in your vBSEO Control Panel (vbseocp.php).

If you nofollow your member profile links, Google may not crawl your profile pages, allowing it to focus on your other valuable forum content instead.

DigitalPoint has high traffic and many links to it. They have stated that they are not particularly concerned with SEO. I would not use them as an example of effective SEO - although they are certainly a very successful forum. With vBSEO, they would likely be even better.

[Seleno]

thanx Joe ward
so if i NoFollow member profile google will index my forum threads faster?

[Joe Ward]

thanx Joe ward
so if i NoFollow member profile google will index my forum threads faster?

Somewhat faster, because it has *less* pages to crawl to navigate your site.

Think of it this way:

Let's say that Google "planned/scheduled" to crawl 1,000 pages of your site today.

As they crawl, they ended up crawling 500 thread pages, and 500 member profile pages.

The thread pages have valuable content that deliver you traffic, but the member profile pages do not yield as much traffic and also are filled with outbound links to non-relevant 3rd party sites (i.e. from their signatures).

So - when the day is done, even though Google crawled 1,000 pages, only 500 of them are content rich and valuable.

Now - Google may come back to your site in 15-30 days and crawl another 1,000.

But... if you had blocked the member profile pages, Google would have already crawled 1,000 valuable content rich thread pages instead. 15-30 days later, they would do the same.

In this example, Google would be crawling your site approximately 2 times faster!

Google is only going to crawl so much of your site per significant visit. So, it's best to make sure you "feed" Googlebot your valuable content, and keep the noise content out as much as possible.

On top of this, if Google finds that you have a lot of unique content, and very little "garbage" or "noise" content, they will boost the crawling priority of your site.

If site A is 90% quality content, they will want to keep crawling to discover new information to make available to Google searchers.

If site B has only 30% quality content, and is filled with noise pages like member profile pages, duplicate archive pages, and even redundant showpost pages, Google may "think" of the site as low quality and not worth crawling further. In this way, crawling priority may drop.

I'm all for lots of content. That's the true power of forums and user generated traffic, that allows for the gathering of Web hits from thousands of different search phrases.

But - lots of content - doesn't mean lots of pages IF those pages include noise, duplicates, low value content, and non-relevant links, etc. In this case, less is definitely more.

[Seleno]

thanx alot Joe ward for your help
should i Add rel="nofollow" to ALL External URLs?
some ppl say that without nofollow forum will lose traffic or something like this

coz i just ordered banner ad in big forum, they are adding NoFollow to my link even its paid

i asked them, they said its better for their forum will not lose crawling or PR from google
what do u think about this also?

i want my forum threads to be index very fast in google

[Seleno]

one more thing
the NoFollow in VBSEO is for forum Home only,after i updated it, i notice that its follow the member profile from memberlist.php
how can i NoFollow members profile in memberlist.php also

[Seleno]

any more replies?

[Joe Ward]

I think you should block your member profile pages in the most complete way possible. This is done by blocking them in robots.txt.

I'm not a huge fan of rel=nofollow, in that I do not expect it to have huge benefits.

When you purchase a link you should be clear up front if you are getting a clean link, or one with no=follow. If you want the link for clickthrough traffic, it's ok. If you want it for SEO purposes, then insist on having nofollow removed (or don't buy the link).

[Seleno]

Thanx Jeo ward
people say its not good for forums to stay without nofollow,coz much of my members adding links for sites and images, some one told me that these links in threads and signature may effect my forum coz google look at these forums that contains much links as spam
is this right?