rel="nofollow" and the shim

When reviewing the impact of out-bound links from a website and their effect on SEO more thoughts on my linking policy and the use of Shimmed Links returned to my analysis.

When I started out with this website and various attempts in Canada with tempusfugit.ca and various Blogger blogs, I attributed my sources by placing hyperlinks to the web resources that I was using for my commentary. Since that time Google and the other search engine providers had changed their algorithms to penalise this practice as it was a means that page ranking could be manipulated.

I have finally convinced myself that there are very few places where a hyperlink to an external site is necessary. Not knowing how the search engine algorithms determine what an external link actually is (the detection of an anchor the destination attribute has an http or a https string coupled with the href attribute). In fact, the construction of the preceeding sentence bore that structure in its creation.

The removal of links

This is going to take some time.

I have left the "shimmed" link syntax in the source of this page so that I can see that I was using a rel="nofollow" there. I had pretty much eliminated the use of the shim when I was modifying this page.