Rel=”nofollow” and Its Effect on a Website
What is the rel=”nofollow” html tag?
The rel=”nofollow” html tag that was incorporated by Google in late 2004 or early 2005 is and was meant to discourage spamming, particularly for bloggers. From Google’s official blog posted on 1/18/2005 “From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.”
It is used as <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Visit my super cool porn site</a>
Adding the nofollow attribute to hyperlinks will not pass any “link juice” to the receiving site. Unfortunately, By removing the PageRank value of links that Google pioneered, people have far less incentive to contribute. The concern is that with less incentive to contribute comes a more stagnent website and therefore world wide web in general. This perception may or may not have merit, but the growing response has been toward “dofollow”, which is not an attribute, but the name of a movement toward allowing the link juice or link love to be passed along.
The method of preventing spamming of the comment fields has been leaning toward such things as the Akismet plugin for blogging software, such as WordPress.
The following shows the value placed on this attribute by the major search engines.
| rel=”nofollow” Action | Yahoo! | MSNSearch | Ask.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Follows the link | Yes | Yes | Not proven | Yes |
| Indexes the “linked to” page | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Shows the existence of the link | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
| In SERPs for anchor text | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
You may have noticed Google, Yahoo, and MSN showing different links to your site, known as backlinks. The above would explain why there is a difference as to what is indexed. Google does not index sites coming from a nofollow link, but Yahoo does.
What are the best methods to show if a link uses the rel=”nofollow” attribute?
Use the Firefox browser and install the SEO Quake plugin. It will highlight every nofollow link in a pink color. There are many other valuable tools available for Firefox. You can find them on Firefox’s plugin page by typing in ‘SEO’ or ‘pagerank’.
In conclusion
I do not believe that the nofollow attribute is the answer and only stifles the growth of the internet, particularly blogs. The best answer is to use Capcha Turing, blacklists, and approval of comments.
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