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Value of This Attribute In Search Engine Optimization

The NoFollow link attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming.

The World Wide Web is about information and "web" of links to that information.

Many search engines, and importantly Google, view a link as a vote for the landing page of that link.

These links can provide the receiving page with credence and enhance its status.

Google attributes the status of a web page by giving it a PageRank.

Exactly how this voting system works is a secret but it seems that each page is allocated say 100 votes. If there are 50 links from the page then each link counts as 2 votes. If there are only 10 links, each will be worth 10 votes.

You may link internally or externally to another domain. It is not known how much a vote is worth if it is internal but it has some value.

You may wish to recommend a link to another website but not "bleed" voting power that could be allocated within your site. This can be accomplished by using the nofollow link. By increasing the value of votes from links on your website, you may increase the PageRank of your web pages. This is therefore important as part of your search engine optimization (SEO).

In the following example, there is a link to Google UK:

Google

The html for the link with the anchor text is

<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/">Google

If I want the link to stand but remove the vote to Google the link becomes:

<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">Google

The attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s lead in their webspam team Matt Cutts and also Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005. In early 2005, Google confirmirmed that hyperlinks with the rel="nofollow" attribute would not influence the link target's PageRank. ahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect this tag.

The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The correct method for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index is robots.txt.

While all search engines support the attribute exclude links that use it from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from one search engine to another

Most search engine optimization professionals started use the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than was originally intended. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, some SEOs have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link must work just like nofollow used for external links.

Several SEOs have suggested that pages such as "Contact Us", "About Us", and "Privacy Policy" pages are not important to earn PageRank, and so should have nofollow on internal links pointing to them. Matt Cutts has never publicly endorsed this point of view, although he has provided indirect responses on the subject.

Several Google employees, including Matt Cutts, have urged Webmasters not to focus on manipulating internal PageRank. Google employee.

No reliable data has been published on the effectiveness or potential harm that use of nofollow on internal links may provide.

Criticism of the NoFollow tag

The NoFollow link attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally invented to block search engines from following links in blog comments, as this was being employed by spammers.

the ory is that if spammers are spamming in blog comments to get better SEO and anchored links for their sites, NoFollow would make such spam wothless. However, spammers still spam.

NoFollow has been adopted outside blog comments. Wikipedia uses NoFollow for external links and Google itself recommends that paid links use a NoFollow attribute.

NoFollow does not discourage comment spammers.

NoFollow in comments on Wordpress blogs is the default, and many bloggers do not realize that they are using NoFollow.

Some suggest that linking with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not really trusting them.

Search engines should be able to develop a method of identifying and devaluing links to spam sites which were placed in blog comments. Why should everyone who posts in blog comments suffer from the actions of a few spammers.

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg says NoFollow is a failure; “In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.”

If you can't or don't want to vouch for the content of pages you link to — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighbourhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed.

If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.

A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, use nofollow on such links.

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