Seo Services Spain Blog

There has been some debate in the SEO world recently in the use of the nofollow tag. I thought I would take the opportunity to post about this further and give viewers to my blog and my own SEO clients an insight as to what nofollow is and how it is used.

The nofollow tag was introduced in 2005 and was agreed upon by the top 3 search engines as a method that could be used by webmasters in order to prevent comment spam on the web. The nofollow tag is not visible when looking at a site and its links, but looks something like this in html code:-

<a href=”www.mysite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Link to mysite</a>

So there you can see the attribute rel=”nofollow”. What this actually says to the major search engines in most cases is, do not pass any link value to the linked to page. So if I place a link from a page on site A to a page on site B and place the nofollow attribute within my linking code, site A will not pass any link weight or page rank to site B.

Like I said previously, this was originally done(and still is) to prevent spammers from placing spammy comments within blogs just in order to gain a link back to their website and hence manipulating the search engine results.

But there are other important aspects to nofollow that need to be pointed out.

With Google, nofollowed links are not followed at all and no link weight or page rank is passed. The page that is linked to can still be indexed via some other link somewhere but NOT from the nofollowed link.

With Yahoo, the link IS followed but no link juice is passed via the link although the page will still be indexed.

The yahoo approach to nofollow is the same with MSN/Live and that it is followed and pages are indexed but no link weight is passed to the linked to page.

“So what”, you might say. What does that mean to me and the performance of my site? Do I need to use it?

My answer is a resounding YES you do!

Nofollow is a great way of doing a number of things including sculpting page rank. By placing a nofollow tag on the least important pages on your site, ie about us, contact us, terms and conditions etc you enable your site to pass and distribute page rank to the more important pages. If you do not add nofollow to these links, pages like terms and conditions could end up with good page rank. What a waste of PR!

By placing nofollows on these links, your more important pages will inherit more page rank which will signal them with Google as being more important. The higher the pagerank, the important that page is too Google, the better ranked that page and more frequently it will be crawled by the search engines.

So you see, although nofollow was invented to prevent comment spam, it does have other great uses which are also encouraged by the search engines. Make intelligent use of nofollow and you will eventually be rewarded with more page rank to your most important pages, better rankings and generally a deeper crawling of your site.