I was going to write a post updating my last post about using LinkedIn to get a link back to your site. This is because they had added a nofollow to the outbound links on the public profile pages.

However, because this blog has been hanging around for a while on my ‘to-blog-about’ list, I thought I had better verify my information. To my surprise, I noticed that the links are back to normal.

Well, wow. The tendency to nofollow external links has been a big trend in 2008. Twitter even shut down a link that was previously followed, after a ‘nudge‘ from Google.

So why have LinkedIn added it back? Because their users valued it? Because the relevant outbound links actually helped those pages rank better? Is it just a mistake in a page redesign?

However, a little more investigation shows that it hasn’t been removed for all users. LinkedIn users are more likely to be real, verified, users which is a good test against spammers and it looks like they have used some other metric for determining whether to nofollow or not. I’ve got a pretty full, aged, active profile with more than 100 connections. Some of my colleagues have newer profiles with less connections and they still have the nofollow in place.

Anyway, the good news is that if you changed your anchor text as per my previous SEO tip, it will be "active" again, if you pass the criteria, apparently as a reward for a good profile.

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