The nofollow Link Attribute
The nofollow link attribute
is not new, but it is still a fairly popular topic in SEO
forums and blogs, and there still seems to be confusion about the use of
this link attribute. In early 2005, Google introduced the nofollow link attribute to “prevent comment
spam” in blogs, message boards, and so forth (http://bit.ly/4wNpLa):
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=“nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
The major search engines support the nofollow attribute, but in different
capacities. Whereas Google will honor the attribute in its most
conservative form—by not indexing or passing PageRank—other search
engines might index the link or even pass the link juice.
Mere seconds (literally!) after Google introduced this attribute,
popular blog, CMS, and forum software packages started to implement it
as part of their released software. The premise of nofollow was to ...