Web Links – dofollow, nofollow, backlinks and other webspeak
February 27, 2009 · Print This Article
A link that is not nofollowed is known as dofollow link. A Dofollow link is a link crawlable by search engine. Dofollow is not a tag, its an attribute you simply don’t nofollow a link if you want it be dofollowed.
A nofollow link on other other hand is one that will not be followed by a search engine robot/spider. This is accomplished by placing the rel=”nofollow” attribute in an anchor tag. This can be useful when you are optimizing a website and do not want to give the destination website credit for the backlink.
No follow links were first developed by Google as a way to control spam links on blogs and sites. By adding the no follow tag to any link, its prevent spammers from posting useless comments simply to get a free link back to a site.
Most people often confuse “noindex” with “nofollow.” In order for a link not show on the results page of SE, the meta robots tag with the “noindex” attribute, <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” /> has to be used.
This meta tag tell search engines that they should not index that page, so it worth include it on the search results.
While “nofollow” attribute tells the search bot comes across such a link, it will know that it should not crawl the site, this link will not be counted toward the PageRank of the site that is receiving it.
A link with a “nofollow”, would look like this: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.link.com“>link text</a>
* Google : The Googlebot does not follow that link. It states that google spider takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all.
* Yahoo : If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link. They follows the link, but excludes it from their ranking calculation
* Ask.com : We have never officially supported No Follow, so your questions don’t apply to our crawler. They totally ignores the attribute.
However, Nofollow links may be used in following cases:
* Untrusted content: If you don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site you can nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. Though this does not stop some spammers as they are out there not for backlinks purpose but also traffic. NOTE: Whether a link is followed or nofollow its still good for human visitors to your website which can turn to a client.
* Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.
* Paid links: Paid links that are not nofollowed can influence search rankings,a site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, webmasters are encouraged use nofollow on such links. Webmasters buying such links coming from sites delivering traffic wouldn’t mind the extra attribute being added to their links.
In conclusion, No Follow does not mean that the SE does not see the pages which the attributed links point to, but rather link value nor referral attribution is given.
You can discuss this and other SEO related issues at Search Engine Marketing forum .
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