Scared of the Nofollow Attribute

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Scared Of The Nofollow Attribute

By: Aaron Wall
2007-01-05

SEO Question: Our site has an about us section which links to press coverage of our site. We are worried about bleeding PageRank, and are wondering if we should use nofollow.

SEO Answer: The worry about bleeding PageRank is probably a bit dated in nature. It is based upon thinking that you have a finite amount of PageRank, and that if you link out to other sites you are wasting your PageRank, but truth be told most good sites have both inbound links and outbound links. And you shouldn't be afraid of a few reciprocal links with large trusted media sites either...as reciprocation is part of the natural link structure of the web, and linking out to trusted sites helps associate your site with other high quality sites.

The goal of public relations is to get people to view your company the way you want it to be viewed, and to get people to talk about your topic and your company from your perspective using your language and metrics.

If you make the mainstream media, it generally has the following effects:

Improved credibility with the media, which makes it easier for the media to review your products / cite you / interview you again (if you show you were trusted in the past it is easier to trust you again).

increased trust with other link sources on the web - for example, the Wikipedia notability guidelines include "The company or corporation has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the company or corporation itself."

When people who do not know your subject write about your subject they will likely trust many of the same sources that the media has (see Wikipedia mention above).

If few people in your market make the news when someone makes the news it may be considered linkworthy.

If the subject that causes you to make the news is a big deal many links will flow. When I made the Wall Street Journal that also got coverage on sites like Slashdot. I also mentioned it on my blog and even more people mentioned it.

Increased trust in the minds of consumers and many members of your market.

Increased mindshare and share of voice in your marketplace.

In addition to the above obvious side effects of media exposure you can also further leverage that exposure. Many media sites have strong domain related trust, and thus rank easily in the search results if they have even modest link equity pointed at them.

When people search for your company name which is a better set of search results:

yourcompanysite.com
yourcompanysucks.com
another conspiracy theory about your company
random (could be good or bad or competition)
random (could be good or bad or competition)

or

yourcompanysite.com
news article you helped promote
another news article you helped promote
yourcompanysucks.com
random (could be good or bad or competition)

In any case, you will likely have some results that are bad or out of your control, but if you link at pages that talk about you in a positive light you are helping those pages be fairly represented or overrepresented in the search results.

Consumers, consumer advocates, raged consumers, and journalists researching your company will research you and your company on Google. When people say nice things about you it helps to make it easy for others to find, and that also helps bury some of the negative stuff.

When you link to a news site you are mentioning it on your site because you trust it. When you use a nofollow to link to a news site you are saying you do not trust it. If you don't trust the people who are talking positively about you then it is going to be an uphill battle.

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About the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.

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