Hi everyone,

 

Hope you can help and advise me.

 

My site uses an external provider for the shopping cart, so when a customer adds items to the cart they are taken to another domain, when they then click continue shopping or back they come back onto my site.

 

This does however mean that there are absolutely thousands of external links on my site to the cart providers website. My site used to be PR7 but in the last 2 years has slipped to a meagre PR4, I was advised to add rel="nofollow" links to all the cart links - after all Google will not find any content on those pages - but I am worried by adding that many nofollows to my site I may be penalised for PR sculpting - does anyone have any experience or advice on this issue - what would you do?

 

My site for your reference is http://www.dvd-and-media.com

Adding rel="nofollow" to all the links on your site shouldn't have a detrimental effect on your site at all, PR is more to do with how many people are linking to your site, and your whole link architecture, so as long as that's clear and you have many different sites linking to yourself, your PR should be high.

 

Remember that your PR is becoming less important every single day as Google is beginning to personalise and improve their SERPs so that it's the most suitable content first as opposed to the person with the highest PR.

Nofollow links pointing to the cart's site can't give negative effect to SEO. This is essentially a part of your site. You can always add backlinks to your site to give more traffic and customers. Don't worry about PR, what's important is the amount of traffic your site receives.

I just use 'NoFollow' to areas of my site that I don't want people to find because there is little relevant content there. My thinking is (right or wrong) that the main thrust of the site may be diluted by content of little relevance.