NoFollow? I Follow - You Too Follow With Me

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I couldn’t have thought of a better nonsensical title for this important post :lol:. Anyway, in this post I aim to explain to you what the infamous ‘NoFollow’ thingy is and how you use it and why should you dump it(really). Read on.

The Definition

The nofollow concept was invented by the folks over at Google(center of all web-evil, :lol:). According to Wikipedia, the mother of all -pedias, the definition of nofollow is the following   :

nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

As un-comprehensible as that is, all it means is that nofollow is a normal HTML attribute which is added to the link tag (<a href…>). It’s not a standard tag, and it’s not commonly used. All it does is tell the search bot that it should not give or put any value(in terms of worthiness, or importance) to that particular link.

How is this important? Well it is, at least as far as Google is concerned. How? Keep reading!

In the eyes of Google, the importance(worthiness) of your website is represented by the Pagerank of your website. The Pagerank of any website is determined by a number of factors, a major one of them being the backlinks to your site(that is, the number of links to your website from other websites). Normally, people will link to your site without adding the nofollow attribute. This will count towards your Pagerank. But when the nofollow tag is added, that link to your site has no value at all, meaning to say that your Pagetank is not affected by that. Suppose many people started using the nofollow attribute. That’s bad for your site’s Pagerank, because it’s not improving, no matter how many the links. So that’s the real deal about the no follow tag.

Note : The nofollow tag wasn’t introduced to damage website’s page rank intentionally. It was just an attempt to stop spamdexing. It’s used on only specific type of links, such as links in comments. Unfortunately, this attempt to combat spam has been a ridiculous failure and spammers have learnt to adapt themselves to this ‘nofollow‘ feature, exploiting it. Pah! :angry:.

Where is it used?

The nofollow tag is used most in places where there is a lot of user interaction and networking. For example, in comments. Wordpress 1.5 and above automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to all links in comments.

Why should it not be used?

The nofollow attribute was invented to combat comment spam and other spam. But, it’s a dreadful failure, being ridiculed upon by almost the whole of the blogger community. You can read more here:

• Nofollow revisited
• Prepare for more comment spam, not less
• NoNoFollow
• The DoFollow No Nofollow Community on Bumpzee.

It’s just really bad for bloggers who comment on blogs a lot. They comment in the hope of getting more and more valuable links from many blogs, in order to increase their standing in the blogosphere. The infamous nofollow attribute ruins all this but setting the effect of such links to null.

Oooh I’m Scared Now

The nofollow tag is not a big deal to worry about, as only Google seems to be following and using it with the most enthusiasm. In fact, recent SEO experiments showed that Google sometimes does in fact follow links with the nofollow attribute! How @*#@#* is that ??

More good news is that many of the other major search engines(Yahoo, Msn, Ask) pay very little or no attention at all to this attribute :). So no big worries.

Important

If you are using Wordpress 1.5 and above, be aware that nofollow attributes are added automatically to every link in comments and in other elements. You can easily remove them to, presumably ‘dofollow’ by using one of the several wordpress plug-ins out there. Here are a couple of them, both of which I use:

• DoFollow
• Follow URL

For people using platforms other than Wordpress(Blogger, Movable Type…), go here: Ultimate List of Dofollow & Nofollow Plugins.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! (Any contradictions or confusions, or appreciation(:)) can be expressed via comments):D

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