Nofollow Attribute
The “nofollow” attribute was created by Google in 2005 as a measure to control the large amounts of spam and “link plugging” that was overrunning sites such as blogs, guest books, forums and any other site that offered site visitors the opportunity to post any information or feedback directly to the website. Please note that “nofollow” is a non-standard HTML attribute value.
Google gained the support of it’s competitors and other two major search engines MSN and Yahoo who also had problems with the high volume of spam being indexed by their spiders. The nofollow attribute basically marks a link, telling search engines not to index the link or include it in any of it’s rankings and sometimes even search results.
Nofollow Attribute Example
<a href=”http://www.websitecom/info.html” rel=”nofollow”>text for link</a>
Regular Hyperlink Example
<a href=”http://www.websitecom/info.html”>text for link</a>
When to use the Tag
The Nofollow tag should be used anywhere on a page where site visitors have the ability to add links to to the page such as guest books and blog comments. The tag can also be used when linking to sites not supported or even to competitors as to not contribute to higher rankings of their website.
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[...] of websites who were known to or suspected of selling text links on their webpages without using No Follow. A few days however some of the ranks went back to their regular numbers while others stayed hit [...]
[...] measure to control the large amounts of spam and ???link plugging??? that was overrunning sites …http://www.caribwebdev.com/nofollow-attribute/Google&8217s Policy on No follow and Reviews is Hypocritical and WrongI’m not exactly sure what [...]