I don’t think that having links hurts your ranking at all, I think it has no effect on your ranking. If you are linking to content or what have you on other sites, I think it’s only fair that their links are display – if people who linked to your blog did the same as you suggest, then your PageRank would be harder to improve. Having the links on your site does nothing to “distract” the search bots from indexing or anything like that.
As for the nofollow tag, there seems to be some debate on if it really works or not, but even if it does, I think it may hurt blogs, if we all de-linked or prevented following, that kind of defeats the purpose of the web and open information, don’t you think?
The old adage about the golden-rule or the likes, i.e.: what goes around comes around, do to others as you’d like them to do unto you etc, really speak to how links should work. Give it time, if you produce good content, people will start linking and your rank will improve – after all, PageRank isn’t everything 😉
Cheers,
Michael.
Thats very good advice, M…
Thanks!
hmmm… hiding links from searchbots.
It actually could be done if you knew exactly what bots you wanted to do that with.
However, Google wouldnt like it.
Question: Are all the links in your front page?
If the answer is yes (as in “here’s my blog roll, 300+ links…), just move the links to a links page. PR leak problem solved.
If the answer is no (as in they’re found throughout your articles) then don’t worry ’cause it doesn’t really harm you that much anyway, and in fact, it helps in the long run. (Note that this rule of thumb is totally different when it comes to a “forums” setting; there you WANT to use “external nofollow” universally, to keep people from link spamming with insipid little comments like “pwn3d!” and “I agree!”)
Note that although Google hates link farms, it loves linking. In fact, linking to relevant subject pages (like blogs naturally do) tends to help you out, maybe not in PR, but in positioning. (Different equation is used in that case.)
