No Follow code

[BigChris]

Hello Everybody!

I am in a bit of a pickle and would appreciate somebody's advice.

My website will be linking to various websites, some of which may be linking to me. It is not any sort of link farm or link exchange - I will link to them for purposes of information and some of them may link to me for the same purpose. Knowing that being seen by search engines as a link farm/link exchange, having too many outbound links and linking to too many non-authoritative websites is bad, I was am wondering if putting no follow code in the hyperlink of some of my outbound links will effectively avoid the above problems, as I could include no follow code all my links except for my links to select authoritative websites. So, in a nutshell, I guess I am asking if search engines (in particular, google) honor no follow code in hyperlinks or whether they simple ignore it?

Thank you,
Chris

[AussieWebmaster]

The use of no follow can help - basically it tells the engines the links are for actual traffic and not for link passing and if they still go through then that is on them

[bhartzer]

I guess I am asking if search engines (in particular, google) honor no follow code in hyperlinks or whether they simple ignore it?

I have seen it both ways--I've seen search engines ignore nofollow tags completely on some sites and honor them on other sites.

Keep in mind that it's natural to link out to other websites. If all of your links (or the majority of them) are nofollow, then that might raise a red flag. You should be linking out to trusted sites, that's just the way the internet works. The search engines would expect that.