Why Use Nofollow Tags On Your Site?
The Nofollow HTML linking tag is used to prevent search engines from “following” a specific link to another web page or site. As a result, they don’t “crawl” the linked page or raise its position in search listings – both of which typically occur when the Nofollow tag is not applied. Inbound links are a major factor used in determining a site’s position in search results.
So why should you use the Nofollow tag on your site? Here are several potential reasons:
I.) Used when linking to an opponent or competitor’s web site, this tag prevents them from gaining a better ranking.
II.) Google’s guidelines call for using this tag with any link that has been exchanged or paid for.
III.) It may be used to control how search linking benefits (like PageRank) “flow” from one internal page to another.
Using the tag isn’t very difficult. The text rel=”nofollow” is added to the standard HTML linking code, between the URL and the link text. Here are several examples:
According to getelastic.com, it is also beneficial for search engine optimization to use nofollow links for internal pages that don’t need to have good search rankings, like the Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Contact Us pages. This particularly applies if these areas don’t have links to other pages of the site in them.
Webmasters may also use the Nofollow tag to discourage “spam” comments on articles and blog entries. In theory, people won’t post comments with spam links if they aren’t going to receive any PageRank benefit from the links. However, not all “spammers” understand this tag’s effect, and some might post links only to gain immediate click traffic.
Nofollow can also be specified as part of the Robots META tag, if all links on the page shouldn’t be followed. Syntax is much the same as the similar “noindex” command. This technique should be used sparingly. Here is the HTML code for it:
Search engines (particularly Google) basically want non-Nofollow linking to only include voluntary links which were not directly created by the web site owner (unless internal). Some exceptions exist, like the Yahoo! Directory. Links are more likely to be perceived as involuntary if they link unrelated sites or have words like “sponsor” above them.
Generally, links with the Nofollow tag (attribute) will neither help nor hurt a web site’s position in search results. The same goes for the sites they are linked to. People who visit a web site won’t notice any difference when clicking links with or without this tag in their code.
No related posts.
Link Building Tips | seowhitehats | March 24, 2009
Great Nofollow information – I will apply some of your tips.
Yes until unless that person is SEO consultant hehe! For a naked eyes, yes there isn’t any difference. And nofollow tag really helps taking off the spammers from the site, as you’ve mentioned about spammers not understanding about nofollow tag, these days spammers use very improved bots which scan pages well before attacking on them. I hate it but yes they contribute greatly to the reason why many blogs and sites turn nofollow.
But a very good article as said above…I think every newbie entering into SEO should read it. Many people don’t know much about dofollow / nofollow yet.