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Nofollow 101 – Understanding The Nofollow Tag by Amy Nutt
in Internet (submitted 2008-09-30)

What is Nofollow?

Nofollow is an html attribute first introduced in 2005 by Google. Originally, the rel=”nofollow” attribute was added to discourage comment spam in blogs. Links with nofollow should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine.

From the Google Blog:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

From Google Answers:

“Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

So the rel=”nofollow” attribute is a tool that can help define your most important links to the search engines.

Search Engines that support nofollow: Google, MSN Search and Yahoo!

History of Nofollow

Originally, the nofollow attribute was used on the page-level with a meta tag. It instructed search engines not to follow (crawl) outgoing links on a page. Example: see code example on main site

Another way to tell search engines not to follow (crawl) pages was to include them in a robots.txt file. But it was more difficult to prevent robots from following individual links on a link by link basis. The rel=”nofollow” attribute allows webmasters to easily instruct the search engine robot to not crawl a link.

How to Spot Nofollow Links?

You can install browser plugins, or edits to Chrome to show a highlighted color over nofollow links. You can also install a plugin to your blogging software.

Nofollow Implications

Links are now either dofollow or nofollow. From the perspective of building links to your site or blog, dofollow links will always give you more link juice. While nofollow links won’t either harm or help your link building
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