Nofollow advertisers with high value sites

[ChristopherGlaeser]

A site with a high PA/DA links to all of their advertisers on their home page using nofollow.  The advertisers generally have high quality sites and none of them are spammy.  Having read this forum for the past couple months, it is my understanding that nofollow should be used to control spam links, and is commonly used in the forum section where site owners can not control or vouch for the outgoing links.  However, as I understand the topic, there is no benefit to using nofollow for high value sites for which you can recommend, and in particular, when the site is receiving money from the advertisers.  The link juice is divided by all the links on the page, both follow and nofollow, and the juice for the nofollow is discarded.

I ask this question because we are one of the advertisers on the site.  I want to contact them about this issue, and request that they remove the nofollow from the advertiser links.

Comments?

Best,
Christopher

[RobertFisher]

If you look at sites like those whose titles end in "pages," it is common for them to no follow their links. The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive.

When we take on a client who uses an advertising medium that uses no follows in their links to their clients, we generally also find they are the type who do "ppc" but have "no way to show you what they paid for a given keyword", etc.  We suggest the clients do not continue unless the advertising medium is bringing them a really good ROI that is demonstrable.

I doubt the site you advertise on will change its policy to assist you based on my experience with this type. It is not a question of their fear of losing juice, but a fear that they will be increasing their clients value and therefore more likely to lose the client. However, if you want to try the place to put the pressure is on your individual rep. Tell them you are unhappy and you think they owe you the link in an uncorrupted way. Reps want to keep their commissions and not lose clients.

Good Luck.

[KeriMorgret]

Likely the primary reason they do this is to comply with Google's wishes regarding paid links, outlined at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736. They do not like to see links sold to manipulate pagerank, and adding a nofollow tag complies with their guidelines. They are doing it so their site doesn't get hit with a rankings penalty.

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Thanks!

Best,
Christopher

"Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know." -- King Arthur

[irvingw]

Hey Robert, I respectfully disagree with this theory:

"The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive. "

Giving an advertiser a dofollow link is like gold, so not only will you get more advertisers, but if they do see better rankings as a result they would be less hesitant to leave because losing their links on your site could cause a drop in rankings so just the opposite is actually true regarding keeping them captive.

Also, image links do not pass PR which a lot of people don't know and also there is not anchor text so SEO benefit is minimal. If someone wants to advertise on your site and says they want their image link dofollowed I see no problem, that is of course assuming it's a clean site (which should go without saying because you only want to associate yourself with clean sites anyway)

[RobertFisher]

I don't know that we are saying two different things. I agree that dofollows should gain you advertisers who appreciate what you do for them. Unfortunately, with professional practices and small businesses I see tons of people advertising with companies who state they are doing organic, ppc, content, and building sites for the client. 
The sites are all template sites without imagination and the SEO is the same from site to site. (Which begs the question how can you tell one client you are going to help them to rank higher and higher and then tell their ten competitors the same thing when you are selling them). These guys then put links to the client sites and I have seen NoFollows along with 302's in dynamic urls. First when it says "Company Website" the click takes you to another page on the advertising site. If you search you eventually find a link t the client URL. 8 times out of ten it is either 302 or no follow. As to image links and lack of anchor text, if you or I told a client we were going to link to their site and provide them juice, would we use an image or leave out anchor text? I think it is deliberate. But, I am a cynic on odd days.

They actually believe they hurt themselves by helping their client. Odd, isn't it?

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Does it matter that this site has a DA of 72 with 5K plus domains linking in, and the majority of advertisers have big advertising budgets?  We're much smaller than most advertisers on the site, but all the advertisers are real sites that sell real products with healthy volume.

That said, I understand the purpose of the Google policy.  It's just a shame in cases like this, because we are linked from their home page and that link juice just vanishes into the ether.

Best,
Christopher