01 Sep 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: What is ‘nofollow’ Attribute

No-Follow Attribute and hotlinking prevention are two important factors that help you safeguard your website from link and comment spammers. Let us discuss them one at a time beginning with “nofollow” attribute in this article.

Nofollow attribute

“Nofollow” (rel=”nofollow”) is a HTML attribute designed to fight link and comment spams. If a webmaster attaches a “nofollow” attribute to a link then this gesture means that the webmaster wants to signal some of the search engines that the link should not influence the ranking of the link’s target.

A No-follow link looks like:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount drugs</a>

How different search engines react to nofollow links?

Google: The search giant claims that it does not follow the “nofollow” link, but some of the experiments showed that Google follows the “nofollow” link, but it does not index the target of the link.

Yahoo: Yahoo follows the link with “nofollow” attribute, but it does not include the target of the link in its rank calculation.

MSN: This search engine also does not use “nofollow” links in ranking, but SEO community is unsure if MSN follows “nofollow” links or not.

Bing: There is a controversy regarding Bing’s behavior to “nofollow” links. SEO researchers have found that Bing do not respect “nofollow” attribute and it follows and use the target of “nofollow” link in ranking as well.

The webmasters have reacted to this, and we can soon see Bing following the industry standard for “nofollow” links.

In the next article, I will talk about preventing hotlinking.

Tags: Controversy, Discount Drugs, Gesture, Giant, google, Hotlinking, Important Factors, Link Yahoo, Lt, Msn, Prevention, Respect, search engine, Search Engines, SEO, Spams, Target, Webmaster, yahoo