1

May be a silly question, but I'll give it a shot :).

On my forum app I would like to allow users with sufficiently high reputation display links to their home pages under every post - without the nofollow attribute (while lower rep users will have the nofollow)

I am happy to help the site contributors improve rankings of their own, but not sure if this can actually deteriorate the rank of the host (the site that hosts those links) - as potentially the same link to the user's home page may be peppered in the pages of the host.

What do you think? Thanks.

1 Answer 1

4

You don't leak rank when you link out to another site.

The rel="nofollow" link attribute was designed to ensure that you had some control over linking to sites/pages you couldn't vouch for, clearly in this scenario, you are vouching for the validity/relevance of that site/page.

The only "impact" you might experience is by the calculation of PageRank (PR) that is distributed - but if you're worrying about PageRank, then you're worrying about the wrong things...

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  • Thanks, +1 for the relevant link :) I am just worried that my site or others that use the app might look like some spamlinked wikis out there because of many and repetitive outbound links on hundreds of pages.
    – Evgeny
    Feb 7, 2011 at 0:58
  • Regarding looking like 'spamlinked wikis', sure - this can be an issue. But realizing that this is already a common issue with blog comments, forums, wikis etc - as long as you're doing it ethically you should be fine. That being said, there's nothing better than a contextually relevant editorial (link inside a relevant paragraph) link... Feb 7, 2011 at 3:59

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