The “nofollow” html attribute explained
Posted May 22nd, 2009.
“nofollow” is a html attribute for hyper links which causes the link not to pass any credit that will improve the target sites ranking in search engines. Selfish you say? No. Read on to find out why.
The nofollow tag was created by Google as a means of reducing spam, primarily on web pages where users can add their own links e.g. blog comments. In the past, spammers were able to trawl blogs leaving behind them a sea of useless comments such as “good post” with links attached to there own websites.
The google search engine would then discover these links and assuming that a large amount of inbound links equalled a popular, quality site it would rank the site higher and higher in the search results as the volume of links increased, despite the fact that the site may have little or no useful content.
The problem for bloggers, is that such sites are often discovered by Google for what they are, and penalized in the search rankings. By openly linking to such sites you can be seen to be promoting them and become part of the bad neighbourhood of links, getting yourself penalized in the process.
Links left in comments on your blog can still be click and viewed as per normal, rewarding any genuine readers for taking the time to respond to your post, while the implementation of the nofollow tag has removed any reason for link spammers to target your site.
Most blog themes are set to nofollow comment links automatically, or would be added by the designer of your custom theme. To easily check if you’re blog is using nofollow view the source of your webpage in your browser and look for rel=”nofollow” in your comment links.
What are your thoughts?
Does your blog use dofollow? Has this increased your spam?
