Blog reputation, link selling, and no-follow tags

This topic has been at the back of my mind for a while now. I just had to express my feelings right now because I learned something that would help another blogger also.

The following is a conversion that I am having with somebody who wants to advertise on my blog but does not really know which blog or blogs I own. I will call him Dan:

Dan: Hi, I am interested in advertising my client on your blog. Can you get back to me on this. Thanks.

Me: Hello, I received your message. Who is your client?

Dan: Hi, I have a range of clients. I'm looking for text link advertising. Can you remind me of the blog(s) you run? Thanks.

Me: Hello. What size of advertising budget do you have in mind?

Dan: It would depend on the blog. Can you remind me of the blog(s) you run.(sic).

He will not be reading this post, so I will tell you that my next e-mail to him would read, "How or where did you get my e-mail address...?"

That ongoing e-mail conversation is important because accepting paid text link advertising could lower your blog reputation and reduce the PageRank of your blog content in the displayed search results of the major search engines.

So, how can one make money with a blog while writing about what is dear to one's heart? The answer is making all your external links 'no-follow'.

Happily, at least one of the major paid review and link selling websites has acknowledged this fact by deciding to accept advertising only from advertisers that do not request for 'do-follow' or non-no-follow links in sponsored posts.

So, I have decided to make my links no-follow for external content, as well as never removing the no-follow tag in the HTML of my blog template, although the latter measure is not a guarantee for gaining or losing pagerank.

Now, back to Dan. My full e-mail to him should then be: "How or where did you get my e-mail address and will the text links be no-follow?"

That way, anyone who wants to follow a link can do a 'copy and paste' instead of a 'click', while I retain my pagerank and blog reputation and make some money. What do you think?


UPDATE - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 @ 01:30 PM:

I had been preoccupied building up this blog site since publishing this post and forgot to give some more feedback until now.

Dan: The text links cannot be no follow. Your email address was acquired from a blog.

Me: If they are not no-follow, then I could lose pagerank. I have many blogs but here's my latest. You can tell your clients to have a look, too.

I have not heard from Dan again. Just needed to let you know the latest development.