Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So my question is: If I add the client's site to my portfolio but add a nofollow tag to the outbound link, will I still receive the full benefit of the inbound link that I have from them? Or will Google still look at the fact that we're pointing to one another (even if PR juice isn't passed from them to me) and devalue the link pointing to my site?
I'm trying to determine how I can add client sites to my portfolio without devaluing inbounding links and deep links from them.
Sounds a tad sneaky to me, but hey, it's your business reputation on the line.
Search engines do follow nofollow, just without the 'credit' - so the SEs can still get you on a bad neighborhood basis, and what you are doing will be 'visible' to them.
No way to know exactly what they'll do about it; probably nothing at all.
So you create a link to your site and place it on theirs, but you are not happy to reciprocate? Sounds a tad sneaky to me, but hey, it's your business reputation on the line.
It's not sneaky at all. Each client knows in advance that I'll have a credit in their site footer unless they request otherwise. They also know that I have no reason to link them on my own site unless I decide to add them to my portfolio. So this isn't a reciprocal link exchange between webmasters, only a handful of my clients get a link.
Search engines do follow nofollow, just without the 'credit' - so the SEs can still get you on a bad neighborhood basis, and what you are doing will be 'visible' to them.
That's primarily what I wanted to find out. If that's the case, there must be some sort of alternative, such as a javascript-based link or some sort of redirect. Something to guarantee that search engines will not recognize that I'm linking to them at all, but still allow human visitors to view samples of my work.
It might be better, however, to place the links on a page blocked by robots.txt or noindex.
Just out of interest, do your clients get to choose whether they link to you - or is it laid down in your contract?
search engines still follow the link even if it's got nofollow on it, so they will still know the other one is there.
Just out of interest, do your clients get to choose whether they link to you - or is it laid down in your contract?
It's not in writing, it's completely up to them. As far as I can remember, none of my clients have ever had a problem with site credits. The reason why I don't want to trade links with certain sites is that I may do a redesign for a website with a high PR value and a significant number of backlinks, and that inbound link from them would give me a huge boost (particularly if I'm deep linking). In some cases, I'd rather exclude a client's site from my portfolio or other page in order to preserve the value of that inbound link. Again, this isn't linking directly for their benefit, they understand that the only reason I have to link to them is if I want to showcase my work to prospective clients.
[edited by: DXL at 2:30 pm (utc) on Aug. 30, 2007]
Search engines do follow nofollow, just without the 'credit'
A very recent quote from Matt Cutts:
"for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery."
<added>Just noticed Tedster's post [webmasterworld.com] on the Matt Cutts quote.</added>
As for links in javascript, Google at least has been following anything that can easily be seen as a link, such as http://www.example.com, for a few years. But will not parse (or I should say I haven't yet seen it parse), something concatenated in a documentwrite, along the lines of 'http//' + /www.' + 'example.' + com'.
we don't even use such links for discovery.
Now there's an important fact!
Memorize and eat this page .... :)
