Misuse of the Term “Bleeding Page Rank”
Never has a term so badly been misused in SEO than the this concept of “bleeding page rank” People adding nofollows all over the place and to petrified to link out to anyone, ever. I have had many well meaning but ignorant web masters contact me when setting up client blogs to make sure I know about nofollows and to add nofollows to all the outbound links because of bleeding page rank.. GULP. Bleeding page rank is when you pass UNNECESSARY page rank
Examples of Bleeding Page Rank
- you link out out to Wordpress.com in your sidebar on every single page of your site.(and if you have not changed your sidebar or meta information in widget wordpress theme files then you probably do). Tricky but you should change meta information in widget.
- Payment information links and security links in footer. Most online shopping sites will have payment info in their sidebars- links going out to major credit cards, Paypal, hacker safe sites, etc. You maybe have 4 or 5 sites in your footer that linkout sitewide. Add nofollow tags to these or better yet have them link to a “payment option” type page in your site that list your payment types and those links can link out.
- Affiliate Marketing Ads in sidebar. This is great for affiliates not so great for the site owner. If you have plastered you sidebar with affiliate ads and links- take a close look. You might be linking back to all those sites and oozing your page rank needlessly. Add nofollows to these or consider cloaking your affiliate links.
The benefit of creating a great article and and a possible authority post will garner you lots of backlinks and far outweigh what little page rank you are passing on to linked out sites.
I gave out “best site” type awards award on one of my blogs and solicited nominations. The request for nomination themselves got me lots of links. Blog owners asking readers, etc for to nominate and vote for them
In the end I had a list if 25 sites related to my niche. All the sites are my competition. And HUNDREDS of other sites point to that page as the “definitive” “best list” The page makes my lots of money and gets me a crazy amount of traffic- not to mention cements my place on the top of the hill as the authority.
This my be an extreme example- but I want to pint out that you can’t sacrifice a well written informative post for fear of losing page rank or helping your competition. If it kill yo to link to your competition don’t use quality anchor text or add nofollow tags.
Understand that when you have lots of links on page related to a particular subject then it will help your ranking over all.
For example if I have a blog about MP3 players and I am linking out to Ipod, Microsoft zune, samsung and Creative labs the page is a more credible for keywords “mp3″ in terms of page rank or for contextual ads- it helps serarch engine theme your page content.
Sacrificing your credibility and health of your blog just for page rank is a bad idea.
Lisa,
how interesting. Does it mean, that if I write about news and link to a source in every article, I am effectively burying myself?
Nice post!!!Most online shopping sites will have payment info in their sidebars- links going out to major credit cards, Paypal, hacker safe sites, etc..The misuse of bleeding page rank is unfair…Page rank will increase the high traffic in the search engine….