Okay so I felt the need to write about this, since I posted in our forum at Canucks Bloggers on Facebook, to which I received amazing support from my fellow Canuck bloggers. Thanks guys!  I was looking for help and realized how many fellow bloggers were unaware what the “nofollow” attribute attached to links means.

So what is “nofollow?” How does it affect you as a blogger working with brands? What could happen if you don’t use “nofollow” in your links working with paid advertising or promotions?

Google Webmaster Explains the use of “nofollow”

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as | Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag

So what does this mean for you as a blogger working with PR companies and Brands or with Someone who wants to put an ad link on your website?

For mom bloggers what this means is that any link you use in your posts where you received a product, money, paid posts or insertions that are paid, a “nofollow” attribute should be use because the links in the post are considered paid links.

Now all of that is very well and dandy, and in the past two years we have been blogging, brands and PR companies we have worked with are on board with this, and more and more information is being spread around to help Brands understand the importance of rel=”nofollow”.

There is ocassionally the exception.

For instance one partner we worked with wanted us to remove our rel=”nofollow” on a link they paid for (advertising) on our sidebar and if we didn’t, they wanted a full refund. We refused and it caused a whirl-wind of trouble via email that just wasn’t much fun to deal with (for either us) or the other party in question.

If Brands approach us simply to get link juice from us as Dear Crissy puts it. This not good business! For either us or them.

Here at Rants Reviews we are not interested in losing our Page Rank. In fact our rank is at 0 right now and we are trying hard, after only being live for 1 month to improve it. Despite what others think, Page Rank is important. It’s often one of the first questions we get asked when given an opportunity for a review or giveaway on this site.

But it’s more than that. When we do a review we offer great link exposure for other brands and websites. We take our time and effort to blog quality content, sharing with our readers the importance of a product or give our feedback on an item that a company or brand has entrusted us to do.  This includes: Social networking, Twitter blasts, email promotion and more.

So if a company or brand thinks that hooking up with mom bloggers serves no other purpose than than to pump up their SEO, to steal our link juice and boost their own websites rankings… I find that insulting!

So how do I add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to my links?

You can do it by simply copying rel=”nofollow” and putting it after the link tag in the link code in your post. Or I can tell you, here at R & R we use a simple WordPress Plugin called Outbound Link Manager, which makes it super easy to add “nofollow” to whatever links we want in our posts, right from the dashboard.

What about my sidebar links?  Should those be “nofollow”

That’s up to you. Personally the only links we use on our sidebar are limited for advertising. So we also use a plugin for that called Blogroll Nofollow, which automatically adds the “nofollow” attribute to all our blogroll links.  Simple and easy!

I have to tell you, Dear Crissy’s article as well as what we went through today has made us open our eyes as to where our links are going, how to follow Google’s Terms, and how to make companies, brands and those seeking advertising more aware that our sites reputation is based on the great content we can provide for them, good traffic exposure, and quality readership.  Not on stealing our link juice so they can boost their site simply because they sent us some shampoo or a toy for us to review.

How about you? Do you use the “nofollow” attribute attached to your links?