No Comments Written by Robert on August 17, 2008 – 7:51 pm

Attaching a nofollow attribute to a link is your way of telling the search-engine spiders that they should not follow that link or view that link as anything of significance when determining ranking. Although the nofollow attribute was developed to prevent the influencing of search-engine rankings through spamming blogs and guest books, it can also be used to funnel relevance and authority throughout the individual themes of your Web site.

The nofollow attribute can also be used to link to other Web sites that are not directly related to the content of your own Web site. More recently, Google has asked that all paid links be tagged with the nofollow attribute to indicate that the links should not affect ranking influence.

Attaching a nofollow attribute to a link

Nofollow is an HTML attribute value applicable to hyperlinks that informs the search engines not to follow that link. Linking to another Web page can influence that page’s rankings in the search engines. If you want to link to a page but not influence that page’s rankings, use the nofollow attribute. You can apply the nofollow attribute to any hyperlink by attaching rel=nofollow to the HTML anchor tag.

It was developed to deter forms of Web spamming such as comment spamming and guestbook spamming. Many blog and guestbook software applications now automatically attach this attribute to all user-posted hyperlinks.

If your site is broken down into sections for example, baseball, football, and basketball and each section contains pages about your favorite players in each sport, for example, it would not make sense to the search engines to see a link between pages about your favorite baseball players and pages about your favorite basketball players unless there is some direct relation between the two. If you believe it is beneficial to your visitors to link between two unrelated pages, use the nofollow attribute to prevent the search engines from following that link.

Nofollow is an HTML attribute value applicable to hyperlinks

If your Web site has numerous categories or themes, interlinking between those categories could hurt your search-engine rankings. The search engine spiders follow links from page to page within your Web site. If those pages are not related, the search engines may have a difficult time determining the theme or topic of your content.

Consider adding a nofollow attribute when linking between pages within your site that reside in differing thematic categories. This prevents dilution of your themes when cross-linking between unrelated pages and helps to build relevancy and authority for the different content areas of your Web site.

Nofollow is also used to prevent the passing of PageRank, or PR, from one page to another. PageRank passes from page to page within your Web site, and dilutes as it passes throughout your site. Essentially, adding the nofollow attribute to a link tells the search engines not to use that link as a positive factor in their ranking algorithm. You may not be interested in certain pages ranking, such as a company information page or a page that contains contact information.

Normally, you link to these pages directly from the main page of your Web site. Add a nofollow attribute to these links throughout your Web site, and you prevent wasting the passing of PageRank to these pages. Google introduced the nofollow attribute in early 2005, and both Yahoo and MSN claim to adhere to its rules as well. Some theorize that Yahoo and MSN do not take this tag into consideration when crawling through links.