mel13

Hi, everyone. I'm a newbie to all this, so I wanted to get some help.

I'm setting up a site and I needed to know the deal with "nofollow" links.

I've come across a lot of info about this on Google, but I have this particular problem:

I'm using a link cloaker (Link Cloaker Professional), where the cloaked link is sort of disguised as another page on my site. Now, I was wondering if I should use nofollow attributes for these links.

I've heard that using nofollow will help me keep PageRank to myself instead of leaking out to those sites I'm linking to. The thing I'm having a hard time understanding is, since the nofollow links are still essentially MY pages, is this not a good thing to do? Do I want these pages (which are basically just redirect pages) to be indexed and ranked?

My site can be found at everythingfreelance.com (It's down right now though because I'm transferring nameservers.).

Thanks in advance for your help!

erbuc

Just a quick question ... if the pages are on your site, why do you want to cloak them?

My opinion is that I would want as many of my pages indexed by Google. Each page, if keyword optimized properly, could prove to be a good landing page.

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mel13

Thanks for your reply!

These pages are not technically a part of my site, although they are on my server.

Here's an example:

I have an affiliate link. Then, I cloak this affiliate link with Link Cloaker Professional, which turns my affiliate link into an HTML page (let's say it's named promotedpage.html) that I store on my server. The content of this HTML page is just a redirect script.

When someone clicks on a link to this HTML page, he is redirected to the sales page of the product I'm promoting. However, what he sees in his URL bar is not the sales page's real address. Instead, he sees this something like this - www mysite com/promotedpage.html - so it looks like the sales page is directly under my domain, when it's really not.

So, my question is, do I want to use "nofollow" attributes for the links to promotedpage.html? The technical content of this is the redirect script, but the "real" content is the sales page I'm promoting.

My current theory is that I SHOULD use "nofollow" because I don't want my PageRank to leak to the sales pages I'm promoting. Also, if somehow promotedpage.html gets indexed, the user would be taken directly to the promoted site/sales page and not to my site.

I hope this makes sense somehow. I understand it's a complicated problem (or is just hard to explain).

erbuc

Ah yes ... no I fully understand.

You would be correct to use the 'nofollow' attribute then for those pages. Makes good sense.

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mel13

Ok, great! Thanks for your help!

pmore

Lol I gotta say, that wasn't the typical kind of 'newbie' question I was expecting to help out with when I opened this thread!

Fairly advanced I would say

mel13

Hey, that's actually good to hear! I hope this means I've done at least a fair amount of research for a newbie.

I'm sure there's so much I still don't know. I'm already learning so much from this forum.

By the way, care to share your opinion, pmore, on whether or not I should be using nofollow links for those redirect pages?