Website links and the ‘nofollow’ tag

For some years now Google and the other main search engines have recognised the ‘nofollow’ tag as an attribute for hyperlinks between web pages and this is now commonly being used by blogs and other websites that attract user comments. It’s therefore an important consideration for link building campaigns and something that needs to be checked within the source code of any page that offers potential links.

It was in early 2005 that Google first announced the introduction of the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks in an attempt to stop ‘comment spam’ on blogs, guest books and other similar sites. You’ve probably seen the type of thing ‘ meaningless comment added to the bottom of a blog post, or blatant advertising for another website which attempts to take advantage of the link made available with each comment. In short, content that adds no value to the original blog post with the direct intention of gaining some link value from the site.

This tag resulted from the new opportunities that were created to build links from blogs and forums to third party websites. It is also now being applied to other ‘Web 2.0′ applications like Wikipedia, or bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us), photo sharing sites (like Flickr) and social networks (like Facebook). By recognising this ‘nofollow” attribute on hyperlinks, Google moved to cut out unnecessary ‘link spam’ by not giving such links any ranking ‘credit’ within their search results. In short, the tag doesn’t provide a negative ‘vote’ for the site where the comment or link is posted, but it just ignores the link and makes sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

By reviewing the HTML code of a blog, you are now likely to see a link that used to say something like:
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

to a comment code that says:
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.

This is another example of an opportunity for SEO spam being restricted to avoid abuse and, consequently, the application of this link attribute has been the cause of much debate on the extent that it is now being used to block ‘link value’ from some sites. The tag performs much the same function as the ‘nofollow’ attribute within a robots metatag, but allows the ‘blocking’ of the link to be at an individual hyperlink level.

As a result, if you are undertaking any link building work then you need to check whether this tag is being used behind the links on a potential links page, as this can have an impact on the value of any link development work or exchanges with other sites. There has also been some debate about whether it can be used within a site to try to control the value of links between pages and ‘sculpt’ Google’s PageRank score, although this is speculative and not recommended.

To find out more about the use of the ‘nofollow’ tag and its role in the development of link popularity, please contact us now.

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