What You Should Be Adding The “nofollow” Tag To

It seems like every time I turn around, Google is making changes to their search engine algorithm. For me, I honestly have been trying to focus my traffic methods to other sites besides Google. I love Google and I use it daily, but I don’t want to put all my chickens into one basket and rely on all my website traffic from it. For the last year or more I have been on the hunt for traffic that doesn’t necessarily come from Google, such as Pinterest, Stumble Upon and other social media sites.

Just recently Google did another update. I am not sure how much it affected my site as I haven’t seen really any changes, but I am always trying to follow the correct guidelines so that my stays being ranked and being indexed by Google’s search engine spiders. Since my Pagerank stayed the same, I am also looking for ways to get my PR up. I have my cooking blog that has been a PR1 for quite some time and I would really love to see it go up.

My biggest question lately is what links should I be adding the “nofollow” tag to. Each time I write a new post or write new content for one of my websites, I am always asking myself should I be telling Google not to follow this link. So I decided to do a little research and see what Google’s opinion on this is.

From what I read, we should be using the “nofollow” tag on the following links:

• Untrusted content – If you are linking to another website and you don’t want to vouch for the content on theirs, you might want to consider using a nofollow.  This would also be true for links on comments on your blog/website or links on guestbook entries for those of you with a guestbook. There are too many spammers online that leave comments with links to spammy websites. Be sure if you have the option to leave a comment/guestbook entry where they can leave a link, make sure those are set to nofollow.
• Paid links – If you are getting paid to place a link on your website, make sure that you add the nofollow tag to that link. Google frowns upon sites purchasing links to gain influence on search engine rankings,  so make sure you are following the rules if you are getting paid for the link.
• Register Here/Login pages – If you have a page on your site where the user can register or login, put a nofollow on these links. Since the search engine robots do not have the ability to register or login, there is no reason to invite the Googlebot to follow the link.

Not sure how to add the nofollow tag, see below…

For those of you that have websites/blogs for years, are you going back through your old content?