Blogging Basic Training: NoFollow Attribute

I have to admit learning about nofollow and dofollow links is something I’ve been procrastinating on for months. Honestly, it seemed like a sticky topic, and I ‘just didn’t wanna’! I’ve since decided to act like a big girl and learn about nofollow and dofollow links and how they affect your search engine optimization (SEO).

What is a nofollow link… exactly?

In 2005, Matt Cullen of Google and Jason Shellen from Blogger introduced this value as a way to stop comment spam in blogs. The ‘nofollow’attribute tells some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. Basically, nofollow links tells the search engine to not follow the link, which will not transfer any SEO attributes to the intended page. Isn’t that some great tech stuff?

This is an example of a nofollow link:

<a title="Article" href="http://example.com/article" rel="nofollow"> Article Example</a>

Here’s how the nofollow attribute works:

When a search engine crawler comes to your site which contains links, the standard action is to index the page and follow the links on the page. With a nofollow attribute in the link’s Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) code, the crawler does not follow the link to the targeted site and it does not count towards the link’s popularity in the search engines. The main reason you want to have a nofollow attribute is to prevent spam. You also want to make sure links pointing to any advertisements are nofollow links as well. It is best to use the nofollow attribute for links you don't vouch for.

Link sculpting with nofollow

One SEO technique that has been used is called link sculpting. At one point, this was a pretty cool way to build your page's ranking on the search engine. What some master SEO’ers have been doing is using the nofollow attribute on all their pages, save for the most important ones. This technique will funnel the search engines to the most important pages on your site, improving those rankings and blocking the less important content. If you wanted to really focus on ranking a specific keyword, then you would use the link sculpting technique.

Let’s put it all together: When a link is on your site, you are telling the search engines that you’re ‘voting’ for that link. You're telling the search engine that you trust where the content is coming from - essentially vouching for the site. That’s OK until the spammers come along and clog your comments with spam. The nofollow attribute tells the search engines ‘don’t go there’. You are neither confirming nor denying the validity of the link; you’re just telling the search engines not to follow it. At one time, the nofollow attribute preserved your PageRank. Recent studies show that this may not be the case anymore.

If you’re a new blogger, it pays to know the concept of the nofollow attribute, BUT focus on blogging and worry the other stuff later. If this post helped you out, please share it with your friends.

Love and Faith,

PS. To access the information I am using to get AMAZING results in my business, CLICK HERE.