nofollow
Every blogger and technologist should know that a certain, special HTML attribute prevents links from being counted by Google: rel="nofollow"
For example:
<a href=”http://www.freemacware.com”>This links boosts freemacware’s ranking</a>
<a href=”http://www.freemacware.com” rel=”nofollow”>This links does not boost freemacware’s ranking</a>
Google considers the second link a “non-endorsement” so it doesn’t give the page credit when calculating Pagerank.
Possible uses for nofollow:
- Link to a competitor without boosting their ranking
- Give weight to the most important links on your page and use “nofollow” on all the rest so as not to dilute the important ones
- Discourage spam on blog comments (most blogging software automatically adds this attribute to links in comments to discourage spamming for SEO reasons)
Cautions with nofollow:
- If you buy, swap, or sell links, make sure no one cheats you by adding this attribute to their links
- If you leave comments on blogs, know that links back to your site probably won’t help your SEO since most blog comments are wrapped with this attribute.
Source: Google Information for Webmasters (#14)
March 18th, 2006 at 12:57 am
Enter link building and social relevency. SEO is on its way out (several years, granted, but out).
March 21st, 2006 at 2:00 pm
June 30th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
[...] So I think if people contribute to my blog by adding a comment they deserve a link, a real link without a nofollow! [...]…
August 14th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
So I would doubt if nofollow has really any sense.
In my opinion the nofollow thing will be dead soon…
August 15th, 2007 at 9:45 pm