Feature Req: NoFollow links for certain user groups..

[WebbyB]

Hi,

Globally I can see a "NoFollow" which adds rel="nofollow" to links, but I would like to give some usergroups the power to have dofollow or not have the rel="nofollow" applied.

Can you conisder this please?

[brianhayes]

Does adding "nofollow" have an effect on page ranking? The maths suggest it would improve things, in which case its a good feature to have.

[WebbyB]

Explain....

[blair]

At one time nofollow may have helped pagerank by preventing pagerank leak to other pages, but that is no longer the case.

To keep the math simple let's say your page has a pagerank of 6. Now lets assume you have 6 links on the page, all dofollow. You pagerank is equally split between those 6 links. Let's assign one point to each link. Each link gets equal 'link juice' of 1 point.

It used to be that if you had 4 of those links nofollow, and 2 dofollow, the dofollow links would get more link juice. Or 3 points per link. It didn't take long for people to realize they could 'sculpt' pagerank for internal links, and it also discouraged dofollow to external links. Since search engines (Google) depend on you linking to external pages (Google for its pagerank algorythm) that's bad for search.

Now it works this way. If you have those same 4 links nofollow, and 2 dofollow, the dofollow still only get 1 point each (pagerank does not pass to nofollow). There's no pagerank benefit to using nofollow. It's only a trust factor. Search engines can penalize you for linking to known bad sites. Nofollow links you think might be suspicious. Or that are unmoderated. Linking to similar, quality sites should improve your search engine positioning.

With forums, external links are generally nofollow because not every post is moderated. However, if you have a trusted group of members, or 'staff', it would make sense to allow their external links to be posted dofollow.