Should I NoFollow Links of Reposted Content

[MichelangeSEO]

We've just launched a conservative news site that is just aggregating content (not curating, no original content, but we do choose which articles get posted).

The site is getting a ridiculous amount of traffic because our email list is enormous and we're monetizing it with ads. Working out great.

SEO isn't really a big focus, since we already have traffic, but just wanted to get some insight since I've never worked on a site like this before.

Since all the articles are being aggregated, should we be NoFollowing all the external links. The fact that it's getting so much traffic, I wanted to be able to utilize that for driving traffic to possibly some tier 1 links for another site we're trying to push up in the SERPs, so I was wondering if nofollowing these attribution links would conserver some link juice for other stuff...

 

[Calamari]

If you liked the article enough to repost it I think it would be fair to give them a dofollow. As far as seo implications, and this is debatable, it won't make a bit of difference.

Someone else will come in behind me and say that you can sculpt page rank by doing so, however. I have never been able to prove it one way or the other and I don't think anyone else has either.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I would have a do-follow "Source:" link on each one.

Google may be applying their own rel="canonical" to each post to so that any juice they collect will be attributed to the original article anyways. I'm not saying it would be a sweeping thing across 100% of your pages, but it wouldn't surprise me if you find that a portion of them simply don't rank well.

No-Follow links still let page rank juice out, it just never makes it to the destination page. It disappears into the space between the threads of the web *2spooky4me*

Someone here once said that you can sculpt page rank by no-following links, that the juice that they let out may not be equivalent to a do-follow link. I don't know, I haven't tested it, but it makes sense, just like links in the header, sidebar, or footer will send less juice than an in-content editorial link.

So yeah, every link lets page rank juice out. A no-follow might let less out, but I've never seen anyone test the theory.

 

[CCarter]

I don't think anyone has any theories I can prove and anyone after me that says they do might be right or wrong on sculpting PageRank juice by maybe-following links. Although I do recall in my formal years in my old magic spell classes I remember a lesson which talked a great deal about being able to look at link echoing and catching glimpses of the shadows of a link that sometimes drop fairy dust onto the linked page - giving it SOME juice, but it's all conjecture since I haven't bothered to try doing anything and therefore everyone that disagrees with me is wrong.

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On a serious note, No-index the duplicate content. And no there will not be any positive impact on linking to content from that duplicate content (may cause negative impact but again magic spells, conjecture, yada yada yada).

 

[MichelangeSEO]

Thanks so much for the detailed replies.

We're gonna just keep 'em dofollowed then.

I've been doing a lot of research about how the traffic to the sites with backlinks to your money site is really helping boost some rankings. So we're planning on using this site to send traffic to sites that have links to our main website...