Search engines have endorsed the use of the nofollow tag to help stop the spread of blog comment spam and other problems. Danny Sullivan's early comments about the intent of this tag are... "When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner." Oilman quickly saw a linkbait opportunity and tossed up his "Link Condom" site. I got a chuckle out of Oilman's stunt but didn't think too hard about the nofollow tag until I read an SEOChat thread in which Wander1 shows how easy they are to spot using the SearchStatus plug-in for FireFox. (Links with the nofollow tag are highlighted in PINK). If you read that thread and others in various forums you will see that nofollow is being used for a wide range of "purposes"......
- heavy cross linking within your own network without looking manipulative
- allocating signature links in forums
- blocking spiders from your "about us", "contact", and other utility pages
- various PR hoarding strategies
- various PR funnelling strategies
I'm a bit confused after seeing all of this. Should I condom the links within my own site? How about the links between my site? How about when I link to my brother's basketball site?
Weigh in on this subject and help me get a handle on how a webmaster should use these tags. Are there any ingenious uses of these tags? Are there any abusive uses?
I've used the nofollow only a couple times. Mostly when blogging about another site that I know is or should be banned by the search engines. The nofollow does not keep search engine spiders from visiting your pages, it just does not pass any link value.
But how about the other way arnoud. if my link is placed under a nofollow, will this count as a link. or does it count as a valuable link or just a non so valuable link? please let me know
I fear that you underestimate the sneakiness.
Is there a similar tool for IE, thats my main browser for surfing so would be very handy to have it in that rather than switching to FF.
Ally Macneil, here's a short how-to:
1. create a css file (like norel.css) and save it somewhere on your computer
2. Write the following ruleset to css file:
a[rel~="nofollow"] { border: 1px solid red ! important; }
and save the file
3. Open IE and select tools > Internet settings 4. Select General tab, on the bottom is a button Formatting settings. Click the button.
4. Fill the dialog options. Specify the user-css file to be the same as you created
5. Accept the changes and you're all done...
Overusing nofollow on your internal links seems a bit pointless. I've always been very open and allow spiders to visit every single page and directory on the sites since there is nothing to hide.
dyn4mik3 is correct - if you need to use a nofollow then maybe you shouldn't be linking anyway? Although for blogs this is slightly different as people blog about sites they don't like but readers still want a clickable link.
I think it's lame - waste of time. Let the engines sort it out themselves.
Basically if I don't endorse a link, why is it on my page anyways?
Obviously nofollow started off as a spam deterrent but expecting all webmasters to understand the purposes of nofollow and implement it in code is too much. This is a search engine problem, not for webmasters.
EGOL, think of it as a tool to sculpt things at a link level. You always had page-level granularity (e.g. with nofollow as a meta tag on the page), but link-level tools were hacks (redirects through robots.txt pages, JavaScript, etc.).
Matt - do you feel that nofollow should be expanded in this way? It feels quite beyond the original purpose...
Thanks for the reply Matt! I have never used the nofollow tag. I understand about it's use on blogs and forums but unsure if I should use it on my own site(s).
As an example... Let's say a webmaster owns an info site and a retail site. He would love to put a link on each page of the info site to a relevant page on the retail site but worries about getting whacked for it. So, for that use, should he feel good about linking his properties if he uses nofollow?
Also, I think that a person's alternative adsense ads will show in the Yahoo backlinks. Should nofollow be used on the alternative adsense ads?
As for sculpting... I don't understand.
I have a blog on lawn care, say I review a lawn mower and part of the review requires a link to a site that has further information. Say this site is Amazon.com, if I do not put a link condom on the link in just a few days the product I linked to will be #1 in Google. Why? you know why, the blog is all about lawn care so it is a strong link out. Well, I do not want Amazon.com to be #1 in Google, I want to sleigh this dragon and create a balance.
Amazon is too powerful; they are not the only one who reviews stuff. Do the same for Wiki, they are also not the only one. Link condom Google, DMOZ, blog evangelists, the pope, well maybe not him...heheh
(When Matt Cutts comments in your blog you know you are a spammer or have spammers in your crew) ;)
From my perspective, nofollow is used to say "I don't endorse this link" or "I (the site creator) am not granting my editorial vote to this page"
Any other use is, by definition, abuse. Besides which, who the heck still cares about PageRank flow?? I hope this isn't indicative of SEOChat's users...