The HTML tag "nofollow"
rel="nofollow"
[code:31w2jdf0]<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Check out this site</a>[/code:31w2jdf0]
• Purpose: If you create a link on a webpage you control, setting the attribute to the anchor <a> html tag tells google to not add the link to it's link graph.
• Nofollow is a method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.”
• In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext
- ie: Search engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation
- put another way, a link without "nofollow" passes Google PageRank.
• actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.".
• On June 15, 2009,
Matt Cutts, a well known software engineer of Google, announced that Google Bot will no longer treat nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent webmasters from using nofollow for PageRank Sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. Quotes from Matt Cutts
A better, more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing (for example) which things to link to from your home page.
I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.
I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site.
The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results.
nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.
The time when I would use nofollow are when you can’t or don’t want to vouch for a site, e.g. if a link is added by an outside user that you don’t particularly trust.
I would let PageRank flow even to your privacy and terms-of-service type pages. Even those sorts of pages can be useful for more searches than you would expect.
The hope is that sites will allow PageRank to flow more within their own sites, which yields more pages ranking in the search results.
Linking to high-quality sites does not help your PageRank, but rather other parts of the Google system would encourage/reward those links.
I use nofollow if I link from one of my sites to another one of my sites, or to a paid sponsor of one of my events.” purposeinc, that’s still true.
Resource:
View Nofollow on WikipediaThis is the end of the file.
Matt Cutts on nofollow
Matt Cutts talks about "nofollow"
