Forum website rel="nofollow" is this Good?

[mtthompsons]

Hi,

Forum website  rel="nofollow" is this Good?

We have a Q & A site and have all links as Nofollow. Would this be a good way?

Thanks

[Chris.Menke]

Yes, that's usually best practice.  It is what'd done in most forums today, including here the Q&A at Moz.  In fact, if  you have the Moz tool bar installed, you can turn on highlighting for nofollow links and visit your favorite forums and see what they're doing.  You'll find they're all nofollowed.

[Dave_Whitty]

This is definitely the best practice for a forum. This will take away the incentive for people/bots to comment spam in the forum for a followed link. It still might happen, but at least you have taken away the reward.

[Houses]

Agree with Chris and Dave but it might be worth rewarding top contributors with followed links. It will encourage them to keep writing useful things on your forum and therefore keep others coming back to read it.

Would be up to you to decide who was writing quality things and in a high enough volume to deserve the reward.

[Modi]

I have a different view:- Why you looking to nofollow your forum. Forum pages are Internal links of website. Its actually should be avoidable to make internal pages as nofollow

Refer this Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4SAPUx4Beh8

[Chris.Menke]

Yes, your right Gagan,  internal links are good to be followed,  External links should be nofollowed.

[ReferralCandy]

Gotta agree with you on this. Having a "blanket" rule to render all links nofollow will certainly help to discourage spammers, but may not help in encouraging contributors. Everybody loves a little incentive here and there.

Many popular forums, including Moz Q&A, have adopted structures to remove "nofollow" tag in links or include more links for top quality contributors. You might want to consider adopting such a structure for your forum.