nofollow links on forums

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Hi,

just started my own forum these days and have the first posts from members, some of the having also link in their profile (how amazing)

Because my site is a bigger authority for "php web development" on Google I added the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link element.

do you think that some unrelated link would hurt my rankings? maybe I should show the links only to members?

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I don't think external links will harm your site, especially if you are using the rel="nofollow" attribute.

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why not copy this forum's method on links?

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I don't think external links will harm your site, especially if you are using the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Yes thats what I thought, but why should some one get a link for free because he asked me for help

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why not copy this forum's method on links?

I think I will write a bbpress plugin to do that

How about we all use the nofollow attribute everywhere? Everybody on all websites and blogs. What do you think will happen?
I just installed a plugin on my blog that's cuts out the nofollow tags because if we all do this the web will crash! there'll be no links anymore to follow so there won't be any search results. Bots will run around blind and semantic search will be off the program in a minute.

Does anyone seriously think that this could be Google's goal? Backlinks in forums and comments won't hurt a site as long as they are related to the content. Google has spent millions of dollars for the patent to search comments, they didn't do that to find a bunch of nofollow links, believe me.

The problem with forum and comment links are the spammers, but there is very good software around like askimet that get rid of those posts automatically if you get too many to clean up manually.

The timeline of the nofollow tag:

1. Google invents and patents the comment search bot
2. As soon as the word gets out spammers show up in comment boxes
3. The nofollow attribute, something no one really cared about until now, starts to boom
4. The nofollow tag takes over on our linking politics
5. All social networking sites use nofollow links only
5. The web crashes and the only links we can follow are the ones to our own and to our trusted friend's sites
6. George dies on boredom

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