SEO

What’s NoFollow Attribute?

If you fiddle around some web pages sometimes you find them inside the anchor tags like this:

<a title="SpringFX" rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.springfx.com”>SpringFx<a>

A Little Bit Background

One of the fundamentals on how Google ranks web pages is by looking at their authority. It means that the more web pages linking to that particular page the higher the ranking it will have.

Since blogging become so popular, spammers then found a way to make their website rank high on Google search results by posting spam comments on posts that contains link to their website.

The Google Approach

On January 2005, Google made an announcement that if they see links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, they will no longer pass the “PageRank juice” to that website.

What Does It Mean?

Since when your page(s) links to another page actually means that you are giving a recommendation to visit that page, you actually passing some of your page’s rank to the linked page. However, when your visitors can freely make contents on your page or website (comments, classified listing, etc) sometimes you have little or no control on what kind of websites they link to. With the “nofollow” attribute, you can prevent them to actually pass your page’s rank to bad neighborhood.

How It Will Benefit You?

Your page’s rank will stay intact even your visitors created links to bad neighborhood.

Don’t Overuse It

Google invented this attribute to prevent spammers on ranking high in their index. So if you write a content that cites other web pages as your resource, please don’t add this attribute in the anchor tag.

Why? But I Want To Rank Higher Than The Page That I Link To, Shouldn’t I Use This Feature For My Own Benefit?

Imagine when all the links in all of the web pages using this attribute: there will be no authority pages anymore. While this is not the only way for Google to rank websites, it will make them harder to present you the most accurate search results. And guess who will get frustrated when your search query doesn’t give you the result you want?

Tags: google, nofollow