Nofollow

So I'm just wondering why AdminBB uses nofollow for external links. The forum is very well moderated so it wouldn't be a problem to have it off. My suggestion is to turn it off and jsut make sure you're not linking to any and sites.

I'm just wondering why it's there, because I wrote an article about why webmasters shouldn't use nofollow and some webmasters have strange theories about how nofollow will help their site.

 

Yes, its in xenForo code by default. Didnt know about it untill you told me so I then looked in firebug, and yea nofollow is actually good. keeps bots on your site. So im happy to hear nofollow is here by default.

 

What's a "nofollow"

 

Say google or any other search engine is on your site, if you have nofollow on, it keeps google from clicking on other links then going to the other site. So it wont visit other links, it will just stay on your site.

 

Sounds like a good thing to me.

 

Ok and that's good but....Just yesterday I was talking to another admin and he told me that same thing. He said it keeps bots on his site and I gave him a really nice explanation about why that's not true. So I think it's kind of ironic that you think that too because your forum is about administration and his is about web hosting.

You're free to keep it how you want but I just want to explain it.

So I'm an SEO researcher and what I do is I just find ways to get sites to rank higher in a whitehat way. I sometimes run my own experiments too . I don't do "SEO jobs" for anyone but instead I just write about what I've found. So - the thing is a lot of people think Googlebot behaves like a web browser - and that's not true. I have a theory about why people think that so let me explain it.

I think everyone has heard about the "random surfer model" and how Googlebot behaves like that and I think that's why so many webmasters think Googlebot can "leave" a site or a page. Basically the random surfer model says that Googlebot assigns weight (or trust, or authority; whatever term you like) to pages (remember that it's pages, not sites) by finding the probability that a random surfer would get to that page. And that really does model how pagerank flows. If a page has 3 links it will pass more weight to each link than if it has 30 links.

But, people think that Googlebot is actually "clicking" these links, but that's not how it works. Googlebot never goes from one page to another. How it works is Googlebot loads a page and takes all the links into something like a separate file. This "link list" is a queue for subsequent crawling. Not all the pages in that queue need to be crawled because some of them would have already been crawled recently. Then the weight (trust, authority) just needs to be added to those pages.

So Googlebot will never actually leave your site. You're just telling Google of new uncrawled pages or you're just casting a vote of authority to some pages.

The other reason webmasters use nofollow is they try to sculpt pagerank around their site. They think that they don't want any PR leaking out and they want to send it all to pages like the homepage or other important pages. It's easy to explain why that doesn't work to those people because Google changed how they treat nofollow in 2007 to prevent pagerank sculpting. And you just have to remind them that pagerank isn't "leaking", it's just "voting" so it's never lost.

So if you have any questions please ask or tell me if you disagree with what I said

 

Did this get ignored? That makes me sad. I wanted to debate the issue even if I couldn't change the admin's mind.

 

Every opinion here matters, but even if I wanted to change it I couldnt because nofollow is default in xenforo, they dont have a option to change it. But like I said before I am happy its default because I support nofollow.

 

I'm going to go tell XenForo then And I'll keep you all updated.

 

lol