WTF is the Nofollow Attribute Anyway

Tyler — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:03:22 +0000

After putting up my list of dofollow blogs I got a lot of questions about the whole “dofollow” thing as there is no such thing as a “dofollow” attribute. If I need to explain this to you, end your career in Internet marketing now (trust me I’m saving you a lot of time!) Anyways I called them dofollow because pretty much every blog now uses the (rel=”nofollow”) attribute on all hyperlinks posted in comments. I simply called them dofollow in the sense that there is not a “nofollow” attribute attached to the links in those blogs.

The nofollow attribute was designed by Google in 2005 to more or less remove a large amount of spam from Google’s indexing process. Links that have the (rel=”nofollow”) are not indexed by Google’s spiders and doesn’t have any influence on the target link’s PageRank. After Google made the move, everyone else followed in line and now respect this attribute. However, not all engines interpret the attribute in the same way:

rel=”nofollow” Action	Google	Yahoo!	MSN Search	Ask.com
Follows the link	Yes	Yes	Not proven	Yes
Indexes the “linked to” page	No	Yes	No	Yes
Shows the existence of the link	Only for a previously indexed page	Yes	No	Yes
In SERPs for anchor text	Only for a previously indexed page	Yes	No	Yes

This spam control method is now used almost everywhere. WordPress implemented it in v1.5 to automatically attribute all comment data URLs with nofollow. Large media sites like Digg, Furll, and YouTube have also implemented the attribute to control spam. One of the biggest deterrent for some spammers is not being able to draw link juice from a page… No juice means no ranking for the terms they are spamming therefor why bother on that blog? However, if you are just looking for traffic the nofollow tag does not matter.

SMM Guru - The Social Media Marketing Guru » yahoo

WTF is the Nofollow Attribute Anyway