BloggingWorks

If you are reasonably new to search engine optimization and coding blogs/sites, you may have heard about the “nofollow” code but you aren’t sure what it is. Well here is the explanation and how to use it.

Firstly, lets visit good ol’ Wikipedia to get their definition for what nofollow is all about:

nofollow is an 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 spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

So essentially, the no follow HTML code or attribute value to be exact tells search engine bots and spiders like Googlebot that the hyperlink should not be taken into account for your blog’s ranking in their search engine. You see certain search engines like Google, use algorithms and other criteria to determine a blog’s or site’s listing in their engines. What they are trying to do is to eliminate the old days where people created these sites called “linkfarms” which were essentially sites with no content except for links to other sites. In those days if you had a heap of these linkfarms all pointing to your site(s)/blog(s), the search engine bots and spiders would think that your site(s)/blog(s) were really popular and thus rank your site higher. This was a way that certain black hat marketers used to trick the search engines in order to get higher ranked.

Nowadays the search engine people have woken up to this and have started using algorithms that will penalize sites that have too many outbound links. This is a bid to eliminate these linkfarms and what is now known as the evil term SPAMdexing.

So, if you add a nofollow value to your hyperlinks, you are basically telling the search engine bot not to use this link in its “scoring” mechanism to determine page rank (side-note: this is not to be confused with telling an SE bot not to visit a page or folder on your blog at all, you do this using robots.txt).

Ok, so here is how you use this value in your HTML code. It sits within the values that you assign to a hyperlink - i.e. within your <a href=”" code>. For example:

<a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>

It should always go after the a href link to the site & before the closing >. For those using Wordpress’s visual posting template, once you have highlighted the words to link & clicked the hyperlink button & added the link, click over to the “Code” tab, look for the entered code & manually type in the rel=”nofollow” within the <a href> code.

So, Where Do You Use the NoFollow Attribute?

Well, obviously with any hyperlink that you do not want to affect your score. I essentially use it for all hyperlinks that point outside my blog unless its pointing to one of my own sites or blogs.

It’s a good idea that when you select a new theme on WP, to go through the theme editor and search for any external links like the ones that say “Powered by Wordpress” within the footer. If you decide to keep the external link, add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to these hyperlinks.

Hope that makes sense to all.

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