Let's say I have a set of links such as <a href=>link1</a>blah<a href=>link2</a><a href=>link3</a>,<a href=>link4</a> Where do I place the non follow command and how in order to only exclude those links from being indexed, but allow all other links on the page to be indexed? Thanks.
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com/">link 1</a> Code (markup): That is what I think you are looking for.
Put rel="nofollow" just before the link you want to exclude. It won't affect the other links because the exclusion is link specific. <a href="http://www.xxx.com" "rel="nofollow">www.XXX.com</a>
I never said it would prevent those pages from being index... or at least I didn't mean to imply that. If you don't want something indexed then you would need to put that into a robots.txt file and hope that the spider is behaving and doesn't follow it. What I described above is the "no follow" parameter of the anchor tag which people use to not pass on rank to other sites... such as what you might add to links that appear in the comments section of a blog.
google 'apparently' won't...but that doesn't mean others won't, not very helpful, but its not an exact science its made that way to make it hard to be #No1 apart from they forgot to tell Shawn why would it be that important to DEFINATELY have a no follow?
What makes you think that? It's a Google created attribute. Why would they have people use it for nothing?
Shannon I agree. I have seen evidence over the last year or so of Google following JS links that it didn't previously.
yahoo definitely ignores the rel=nofollow tag, and im not sure about msn, my first guess is it does obey the tag.
Well firstly, the attribute was released in an attempt to combat blog spamming, not for use on ordinary sites. I've done a pretty closed test of the attribute shortly after the tag was announced and did find the link containing the tag did still pass on pagerank (which would assume link poularity) in Google.
Your guess is right. I don't check up on MSN Search much for obvious reasons, but apparantly the picked up on it pretty early http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx
I'm familiar with the reason they created it, but a link is a link. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
The re="nofollow" attribute is for links...and a link is a link whether it is a blog or any other type of site. The Google blog I linked to mentions it... "Q: Is this a blog-only change? A: No. We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author's site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We're working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target."