I have made a point of this in our main Page Rank article. The number of external links directed out of a page will have an impact on your page rank (and inevitably your you search engine rankings). Now I will just try to touch up on it a little more.

The number of external links on a page will effect how Google will view a new web page. If you have a little to many links that will decrease your page rank because the PR of that page will be slightly distributed throughout the rest of the pages. If you have way to many links (like directories) then your page will come out looking like a spam page and you will get sand boxed.

The second idea is really associated with directories and link lists. For now I will just talk about link lists and blogging. When your blog and you are making a link list, give the links the nofollow attribute to each external link in the list to ensure that the page is not sand boxed.

Now, we know for a fact external links can lower page rankings for pages. What can we do to really implement this idea to our websites.

Well, we can work like Wikipedia, and make every single external link nofollow. Or, we can just cut down on how many external links we have on a page.

You can use this information in anyway you want.

Also if you have not seen it allready check out our main page for the complete page rank article.

Commenting on sites that do not have the no follow tag will increase your page rank (I know a double negitive).

How Do You Check If a Website is Dofollow? -

If you don’t know how to check if the site is nofollow here is a little guide. (For Firefox users)

1. Click ‘View’ on your Comand Bar up top.
2. From there click on ‘page source’
3. When you get to that look for a comment name that has a link and copy the link.
4. Go back the ‘page source’ area and click ‘/’ on your keyboard.
5. A little ‘quick find’ bar will show up on the bottom of the browser.
6. Paste the URL into the area. Once you find the URL check if there is a ‘rel=nofollow’ in the area. (could aslo say ‘external nofollow’)

Great hope that helps. Remember that commenting will increase page rank. I recomend finding blogs (you like) that don’t have the nofollow tag and subscibe to their RSS feed. That way you get links every time the person posts.

Also, just make sure that your comments are relevant. You don’t want to come across as a spammer.

What happens is the viewers just get way to used to the adsense advertisement and after a while will just skip over them. Once that happens that person will no longer click the ads. That is where you have a problem.

Now there is a way that you can kind of keep your viewers to view the ads more often. If you are using text based ads then you can use the multiple pallets option when you are designing your ad. The slight difference in the screen makes the eyes notice what has changed and thus brings the eyes to your ad.

Next you can be creative where you place the rest of the Adsense ads. A good place to insert the ads is under the thread area which is what most of the people see. If you want put 2 leaderboard sized ads one on top of the other. That is what a good portion of my forum admin friends do, not to mention digitalpoint forums.

A nice little tip is to not use the link ads from adsense. They usually are no good and will just take up space on your forum.

Make more by using Adbrite with Adsense-

Well Adsense, even with great placement and color optimization, can only bring in so much money. The next thing to do is use other ad networks to bring money in.

The footer - The footer can’t make you to much money with Adsense. Mainly because people don’t really look down there very often. But, it still has potential to make you some money. For this you can use Adbrite.

Adbrite is used mainly for making money via CPM ads. That, is a forum owners best friend. The CPM ads are great, just place them in your footer. Then you could be earning a decent amount for your traffic with these ads, and many of your viewers will not even notice them. A win-win situation.

Next you can try to pry even more money with it. Adbrite offers you the chance to place full page ads on the page that pay out pretty well. You can choose to have them show up once every 24 hours for each unique IP. The full page ads sometimes pay up to a penny per view. Which is pretty great. Especially if you have a great many guests on your site. But, if this is optional and some people don’t like the idea. I say if you are planning on trying it, think of your guests. Place yourself in their shoes and picture how you would react to the full page ads. Then weigh the reaction with how much potential money their is to gain.

Do Not place inline ads on your site. It disorients the members and almost every time, makes them leave your forum. Also, the inline ads from most programs are not that closely content oriented and you will get ads that have nothing to do with your content. Not very good when you consider that inline ads are all CPC based.