I was reading Nomar’s latest blog entry just now, a post in which he details his bad experience with Text-Link-Ads, in the comments sections he is given some nice advice and realizes some of the mistakes he made when buying his first link. But a comment by one of the readers almost made me fall off my chair:

“Remember that your blogs outgoing links should use a ref=”nofollow” so they don’t drain your pagerank.

The fact that any of this is important is a sad state of affairs. With a little knowledge people can SEO their websites above the competition. But all of this knowledge is important because it is currently the state of affairs if you want Google traffic. “

I’ve tried to flip his first statement as much as I could, and still couldn’t see it as anything else but a very narrow minded statement. Now we can either start using the complicated lingo of SEO, linkbaiting and traffic sources, or just explain this simply:

Basically using ref=”nofollow” tags means you are linking to a certain site, but it’s not being noticed by Google’s pagerank logarithm, so that’s one outcoming link less from your blog, and the linked blog will only benefit in the short-term (traffic).

Assuming you will follow this man’s advice, link exchanges are pretty futile in your case, and so is advanced networking options like post-interlinking and more. Would you rather have 5 less outcoming links from your blog, or trade 5-for-5, with the possibility of these links bringing even more links, and benefiting you PR & traffic wise?

Further reading:

- Motivations for Linkbaiting [ProBlogger]
- Why Linking to Others is Critical [Coppyblogger]