Can some one explain to me what the nofollow attribute is with regards to links? I hear this term used a lot but have no idea what it means. thx
he's right. an example of the code would be something like <a href="http://mysite.com" rel="nofollow">mysite</a> you can apply the tag to one link or all of the links on a page if you like. if you don't want to go looking at the code for every link to see if it has the nofollow tag, you can use this free firefox extension tool. it highlights the links with the tag in pink. http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ for example, on this forum the "search" button at the top is highlighted in pink on my screen when I'm using firefox. that's because the link has the tag in it
The nofollow attribute was primarily for stemming the flood of blog spam that was/is plaguing the net. Links that have rel="nofollow" on them are telling the SEs that you cannot vouch for the authenticity or quality of the destination site. But it can also be used for other things, for example if you have links to internal pages that you don't want indexed and/or ranked. A good example might be a login page that has a query string associated with it ".com/index.php&page=login&category=12345." If you had 10,000 categories in your site then you end up with 10,000 duplicate pages. Another example might be an internal link to a script that performs some function such as "clear the cookies" but doesn't really have a page associated with it. There has been a lot of debate on the "law of unintended consequences" regarding nofollow. Jeremy Zawondny (Yahoo) sums it up pretty well here: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006800.html
almost all big blog privoders already use nofollow attribute on the comment. so spam to blogs is unuseful now.
Very interesting I also did not know about this. Does anyone know if WP comes with a no follow attribute already installed.
Here's a few: http://wp-plugins.net/index.php?PHP...a35455e6aff1&filter=nofollow&filter_search=Go... Also here: Google
This is great stuff, thanks guys. This nofollow thing has me slightly concerned now with regards to directory submissions. Does anyone know if there is any use of the nofollow command in free directories when you submit a site and don't take the reciprocal link option? That would seem to be a perfect incentive to force people to use reciprocals. Also is there any penalty in the SERPs for having nofollow links vs. one without it?
Quite often these free directories put a nofollow link even if you DO take the reciprocal link option So you'd better check your every submitted link by hand or by some good link checking tool. P.S. I have even seen that for the first one day they put a good link (before Google crawled it) - and after that they put "nofollow"