As title really - does the tag rel="nofollow,noindex" exist and work? I don't want people guessing, I need a definite yes or no whether this tag works. Thanks Chris
As a additional question... I read about nofollow on a Google blog and they were suggesting that people use it on their blogs to help prevent spam. So "yes" it exists and since this was posted on a Google blog I'm assuming it works for Google but I'm not sure about Yahoo and MSN. However, this blog post was written back in 2005 and I haven't found any more recent info on it. Two weeks ago I heard an SEO guy say that it's important to use nofollow because he was saying that if you link to lots of pages that have a Google pagerank lower than your own it can actually hurt your own pagerank in addition to helping the pages you are linking to. Does anyone know if this is true? I have one site in particular that uses DIGG-style link submission and I was wondering if people will be pissed off if I use nofollow on their links? Is it worth the risk of them getting mad and no posting articles anymore? Most people probably won't even know what "ofollow" is let alone look at the source code for the page, but you never know. Is adding nofollow to all my outgoing links really going to boost my own pagerank? Thanks!
Can you not Hijack my post please?! I know that rel="nofollow" exists, im asking if rel="nofollow,noindex" exists. If you have your own question, start your own thread please!
lol, sorry. Well I did answer your question. Yes it exists and yes it works (at least for Google). I was only asking if it's worth using.
So rel="nofollow,noindex" is definitely in use and recognized by major search engines? To answer your question rel="nofollow" ing your outbounds will keep PR and link juice on your site. Its called PR hording and will help your rankings in used properly.
To answer your question, you definitely risk alienating some users and losing traffic. Ideally what you want to do is allow trusted members of your site to post follow links, but links that you have no control over, which could be spammed, but nofollow on those. But to shut off all outgoing PR from your site could be suicidal.
What if the link is just rel="nofollow"? I know that Google will list links like that at Google Sitemaps, and Yahoo will list them at Site Explorer, but has anyone figured out if they help the site that is being linked to?
I doubt "noindex" in "rel" attribute have any special meaning for Google, Google will only recognize the "nofollow" value. But sure you can have multiple values in "rel" attribute, and it is better to separate them with spaces. From googleblog:
The nofollow attribute on a link is a way to prevent that link from passing link juice to the page it points to. The meta robots tag noindex, nofollow will prevent all links on a page from passing juice and prevent the page containing the links from being indexed. If this page accumulates inbound links then it becomes a dangling page. Here is more information about nofollow links and dangling pages. The nofollow attribute (rel=nofollow) is a way to prevent a single link from passing link juice not preventing a page from being indexed.