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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)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “nofollow”

  1. Blake Says:
    March 18th, 2006 at 12:57 am
    “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.”

    Enter link building and social relevency. SEO is on its way out (several years, granted, but out).

  2. jordy Says:
    March 21st, 2006 at 2:00 pm
    Totally cool. I’ve always wanted a way to call out scam sites without helping their Google juice. You learn something new every day.
  3. Mike's Blog => Say No To Nofollows! Says:
    June 30th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
    I also agree that nofollows are not helping…

    [...] So I think if people contribute to my blog by adding a comment they deserve a link, a real link without a nofollow! [...]…

  4. Jan Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
    Do you all know that Google Sitemaps shows links with nofollow attribute as links pointing to your domain/internal pages?

    So I would doubt if nofollow has really any sense.

    In my opinion the nofollow thing will be dead soon…

  5. Richard K Miller Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
    Jan: I did not know that; thanks for saying so.

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