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SEO Warrior
book

SEO Warrior

by John I Jerkovic
November 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
496 pages
13h 46m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from SEO Warrior

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 ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596804749Errata Page