I'm asking this question with the full recognition that the issue may be a little contentious and possibly unresolved, but I would like the opinions of those here anyway. When I quote another article in mine I always use either blockquote or q. (q is an inline version of blockquote). But I recently learned you can add a cite attribution to those tags. Like so: I have a dream... or
<q cite="www.example.com">He who doesn't ask himself...</q> But these links don't show up anywhere, only in the code. To be as ethical as possible, I also put in an anchor link. That also is my first concern. Can putting the same link twice essentially right next to one another cause issues? To add to the complexity, I've also been researching the <cite>tag. And it's history is a little... well... rocky. It seems as though the current standard is to use either blockquote or q and then add in cite as a footer to it. Like this:</cite> They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves. It was considered as being bad enough to be a slave; but to be a poor man's slave was deemed a disgrace indeed! <footer>Douglass, F. (1999). <cite>[The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass]([link to book (or article where appropriate)])</cite>. Oxford: Oxford University Press,</footer> Notice the cite tag is only around the link to the item in question. Not the entire footer. Also note that the footer is inside the blockquote, thus it is not meant to be at the bottom of the page. So IF this is the standard way to do things, it answers my first question. But is it? And can the use of the footer tag confuse search engines? Ugh, crazy all over the place question, I know. But I'm struggling to find the right way to handle quotations in a way that is both academic, and SEO friendly. Start from the beginning if you must. 🙂

I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/