BinaryWolf

Nofollow Attribute For Links

I’m a little late to the use of the “nofollow” attribute in links. I’ve used in in nofollow in the robots META tag before, but having recently discovered the links version, I’m posting about their use.

The new link attribute is called “nofollow” with rel=”nofollow” being the format inserted within an anchor tag. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.

For example, this is how the HTML markup for an ordinary link might look:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html">Visit My Page</a>

This is how the link would look after the nofollow attribute has been added, with the attribute portion shown in bold

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel=”nofollow” >Visit My Page</a>

This would also be acceptable, as order of elements within the anchor tag makes no difference:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Visit My Page</a>

Once added, the search engines supporting the attribute will understand that the link has not been vetted in some way by the site owner. Think of it as a way to flag to them, “I didn’t post this link — someone else did.” Use it wherever it means that another person placed a link on your site.

If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

1. NOT follow through to that page.
2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.

If you need to link to a site but are worried that a search engine might consider it a “bad neighborhood,” , nofollow could offer peace of mind.

Those who are swapping links with other sites now have a whole new thing to look out for. If someone offers to link to you, you’ll want to make sure they don’t make use of the nofollow tag — at least if you were hoping for some search engine gain. Otherwise, the link’s not going to count.