Links in Article Body Become NoFollowed
Being a market leader means having to make tough decisions sometimes… and this is one we’ve contemplated for more than 2 years now.
What’s happening: Effective later this month, all links in the article body will include the rel=”nofollow” attribute. That means we’ll be instructing the search engines to not crawl those links. Will they actually not crawl those links? I think the consensus is that they STILL crawl those links for indexing purposes, but unofficially.
Why is this being done? To discourage self-promotion in the article body.
The Article Body is the GIVE;
The Resource Box is the TAKE.
This decision was taken very seriously and we did a comprehensive internal stats study and found that 92.7% of our members already do include their links properly in the Resource Box. This change only affects the value or perceived value that 7.3% of our members receive.
What we’re hoping will result from this change: Self-serving active links will end up in the Resource Box where they are suppose to be and thus, user trust and referral partner trust (ie: search engines & other social media sites) will improve. When traffic referral partner trust improves, our members win and we win at a higher level together.
More traffic to us = more traffic to your website… and we’re basically placing a large bet that the negative consequences of 7% of our membership being unhappy because of this policy change will result in 100% of our members getting more traffic in the long haul. Always open to your thoughts? (please keep comments in this thread on topic)
dont mix up two things here. You can still put a clickable link in text, its just that the coding tells the spider not to follow it for ranking purposes. This action will have no impact whatsover on a link placed in the main body of a column as the link will still follow if you click it
February 18, 2010 at 3:55 AM[Reply]