I'll be explaining why it works this way in Link Management section. But just to give you heads up: If you are new to blogging, whenever you mention a link to another site, add an attribute to this link rel="nofollow".
This is how it works: for example, you are mentioning a site: http://www.BostonJewelryMall.com as a part of your blog post/review. In the html part of your blog post, it'll be <a href="http://www.BostonJewelryMall.com">Boston Jewelry Mall </a>
To add an attribute "Nofollow", you do the following: <a href="http://www.BostonJewelryMall.com" rel="nofollow"> Boston Jewelry Mall </a>
I would also suggest that any link you mention opens up in a different browser window. For this, you will add another attribute - "target". So, your link eventually will look like this: <a href="http://www.BostonJewelryMall.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Boston Jewelry Mall </a>
A little bit more about "nofollow" attribute. Links are very important. Search Engines first consider how many sites linked back to your site and then give you some credits for the number of sites linked back to your site. Credits can be different. It depends on the site relevancy, number of back links that site have for itself, and many other factors. But any time somebody mentions a link, the owner of this link receives a credit.
In the recent times, there were a lot of "cheating" with buying and selling links that bring value to your site. Search Engines, and Google, in particular have developed a whole new system that would check the links you are posting and see if they are relevant or not. Search Engines penalize sites that look like they post links to others for a reward. It's very hard to convince SE to change its opinion, once you get penalized. And a penalty means that your site won't appear in a search for specific keywords and gradually loose its value.
Of course, it's harder to check blogs - blogs could be about anything. However, a brand new blog with lots of links may still catch the SEs interest. So, at the beginning, about 3 months or so (of intensive blogging) - please add to your links the attribute of "nofollow".
For your visitors it means nothing, they won't simply see any difference. The link will be clickable. as it supposed to be.
Depending on your blog software, you may have the option of checking "nofollow" when creating a link in WYSIWYG wizzard. Hubspot, for example, has this option available for non-Gurus of HTML. Serendipity (the one I am using right now), however doesn't have this option upfront, so you'll need to click on html button and do it manually.
© 2009 Sasha Grebenyuk
