March 17, 2006...9:30 pm

nofollow

Every blogger and technologist should know that a certain, special HTML attribute prevents links from being counted by Google: rel="nofollow"

For example:

<a href=”http://www.freemacware.com”>This links boosts freemacware’s ranking</a>

<a href=”http://www.freemacware.com” rel=”nofollow”>This links does not boost freemacware’s ranking</a>

Google considers the second link a “non-endorsement” so it doesn’t give the page credit when calculating Pagerank.

Possible uses for nofollow:

  • Link to a competitor without boosting their ranking
  • Give weight to the most important links on your page and use “nofollow” on all the rest so as not to dilute the important ones
  • Discourage spam on blog comments (most blogging software automatically adds this attribute to links in comments to discourage spamming for SEO reasons)

Cautions with nofollow:

  • If you buy, swap, or sell links, make sure no one cheats you by adding this attribute to their links
  • If you leave comments on blogs, know that links back to your site probably won’t help your SEO since most blog comments are wrapped with this attribute.

Source: Google Information for Webmasters (#14)

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