Rel-nofollow for price comparison site?

[lancerpanz]

I run a price comparison site, so we have TONS of outbound links.  Should my outbound links be marked with 'rel=nofollow'?

[Everett]

Many of the big affiliate and price comparison websites route links through an internal folder first. This allows them to record the conversion, set a cookie, etc... It also makes all of those outbound links look like internal links. Usually it looks somethingl ike this:

Web Page hyperlink for "Visit OnlineStore.com" is actually a link to YourDomain.com/partners?merchant=OnlineStore. From there it will redirect (what kind doesn't really matter here) to OnlineStore.com along with any affiliate code you have added to the URL for their tracking purposes, if necessary. Typically /partners is blocked in the Robots.txt file so the search engine can't even follow it to see that it's an external link.

[webtheoria.com]

I would want to keep my follow links to a bare minimum, very trusted sites. The rest make them nofollow, without having to worry about problems in making the change!

[JaredCarrizales]

Ben,

Not necessarily, the outbound links in the case of your site are to help your visitors, and I don't really see a reason to nofollow them. That said, I'm assuming your asking this because of disbursement of link equity, and in that case I still wouldn't mark the links as nofollow. Instead, I would suggest changing the site structure or the outbound links themselves so that there's not so much on one page.

Changing links to nofollow on a case by case basis isn't really scalable, and if it's a big problem, there's probably other issues that need to be resolved first.

Hopefully that helps!

[Bigb06]

Hello,

In my opinion you should put rel=nofollow on all external/affiliate links (and prey not be penalized by Google Animals)