What is difference between no follow, dofollow and external nofollow

hi guys,

do you anybody know, what is meaning, difference and benefits of no follow, do follow and external no follow in links?

like

 

They mean slightly different things at different engines. The rel="nofollow" attribute was invented to fight spam once blog commenting became abused by spammers as a method of getting backlinks.

rel="follow" tells Google that:

1) it is okay to follow the link to discover the page located at the target URL,
2) they should count the link as a valid inbound link to the target URL,
3) they should give the target URL credit for the link text used in the link,
4) they should pass the target URL Page Rank, and most importantly...
5) you ARE willing to vouch for the target URL... that it IS a "good neighborhood" site... (i.e. that if they do something bad, you ARE willing to accept a penalty for having promoted or linked to their site).

rel="nofollow" tells Google that:

1) you do NOT want them to follow the link to discover the page located at the target URL (however, they may still discover the page by following a different "do" FOLLOW link to the target URL),
2) they should NOT count the link as a valid inbound link to the target URL,
3) they should NOT give the target URL credit for the link text used in the link,
4) they should NOT pass the target URL Page Rank, and most importantly...
5) you are NOT willing to vouch for the target URL... that you are not 100% sure that it is a "good neighborhood" site... (i.e. that if they do something bad, you're NOT willing to accept a penalty for having linked to their site).

rel="external" was proposed as a replacement for target="_blank" which has been deprecated (i.e. to open the link in a new browser). However I'm not sure how many user agents/browsers currently support this. If it is there and the browser does NOT support it, the browser simply ignores it so it should do no harm. But if the browser does support it then the link (whether FOLLOWed or NOFOLLOWed) should open in a new window.

You can use NOFOLLOW freely without ever fearing being penalized. You can use it on links to internal pages as well as links to external pages to prevent to flow of Page Rank. However, using it to "sculpt PR" by placing it on links to internal pages is of little use in rankings since 1) PR plays on a miniscule role in Google's ranking algorithm now days and 2) pages usually have lots of outbound links and you'd have to NOFOLLOW a significant number of outbound links on a page to make a noticeable difference to SERP rankings for URLs on the site.

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> is similar only it is a page level nofollow (don't follow ANY of the outbound links from this page) rather than a link level nofollow. The page can still be indexed since <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> is equivalent to <meta name="robots" content="nofollow,index">.

Using a disallow in your robots.txt is equivalent to a <meta name="robots" content="nofollow,noindex">

 

Thanks for that info Canonical. I had a good read. That should explain everything about these link rel issues.

 

nofollow and external nofollow are just the same, that you are not sharing the link juice from your site to the linking site while the dofollow is the opposite of it.

 

thanks , a good read .

and i would liek to add ( i think, ) external nofollow means nofollow on external domains only, and nofollow generally means nofollow on anywhere from that link. ( i have seen this work on yahoo answers, ) and it kinda makes sense.

(although i could be wrong)

 

i'd probably disagree with

3) they should NOT give the target URL credit for the link text used in the link,

PR they will NOT pass that's a given, but when it comes to the anchor text a lot depends on the surrounding text, quality of the comment, quality of the blog among many other things. I personally tracked down a website that is ranked in top 10 for "Toronto realtor" that gets all its juice for this keyword from nofollow comment links. But these are incredibly customized ones well written and add actual value to the blog post. The site in question has 1 or 2 occurrences of this keyphrase in the on-page and no dofollow links with this anchor at all. it can't be stemming either.

 

I disagree completely... Matt Cutts and others at Google have said definitively that NOFOLLOWed link 1) do not pass PR AND 2) do not help your ranking in any way at Google. They even drop the link from their link graph. Now Yahoo! and other search engines may choose to count NOFOLLOWed links. But Google definitely does not.

You have no way of knowing if the the Toronto realtor web site has followed links to their site that Google knows about. Google may know about links that are not listed in Yahoo! site explorer. And the LINK: operator at Google as well as the Pages With External Links page in Google's webmaster tools BOTH only show a sample of links...

 

I disagree completely... Matt Cutts and others at Google have said definitively that NOFOLLOWed links 1) do not pass PR AND 2) do not help your ranking in any way at Google. They even drop the link from their link graph. Now Yahoo! and other search engines may choose to count NOFOLLOWed links. But Google definitely does not.

You have no way of knowing if the the Toronto realtor web site has followed links to their site that Google knows about. Google may know about links that are not listed in Yahoo! site explorer. And the LINK: operator at Google as well as the Pages With External Links page in Google's webmaster tools BOTH only show a sample of links...

 

I disagree completely. I guess we can agree to disagree... But Matt Cutts and others at Google have said definitively that NOFOLLOWed links 1) do not pass PR AND 2) do not help your SERP rankings in any way at Google. If they gave you credit for the link text, then that would be helping your rankings which Matt and others have stated does not happen for no followed links. They even drop the link from their link graph. Now Yahoo! and other search engines may choose to count NOFOLLOWed links or give you credit for the link text. But Google definitely has stated they do not.

You have no way of knowing about all of the the Toronto realtor web site's FOLLOWed links to their site that Google knows about. Google may know about links that are not listed in Yahoo! site explorer. And the LINK: operator at Google as well as the Pages With External Links page in Google's webmaster tools BOTH show only a sample of the known inbound links...

 

There is no 'dofollow' or 'follow' value proposed for rel attribute, however nofollow is used when you want to link to someone but don't want to vouch for their legitimacy. It was introduced to prevent spammers from buying links, advertisers are advised to use rel="nofollow" for paid links.

rel attribute can have multiple values and they are separated by space.

rel="external nofollow" or ref="me bookmark" etc. You can write a simple script to ensure that all rel external open in new window though I prefer leaving that to user's discreetion. ref="me" can be used to tell search engine that the page being linked belongs to you.

@Canonical: target="_blank" is not part of xhtml strict BUT rel=external need not mean the link should open in new window.

 

rel= nofollow tell the google not to index the link.. all other are allow the link to index.. but no idea regarding externel nofollow

 

no follow will not be indexed by google and will not be counted as backlink in sense of page rank, do follow will be also index and its pr would be counted by google.

 

rel="external nofollow" is same rel="nofollow"

external nofollow
This can be found in blog comment area usually.

 

From wikipedia : nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

 

external nofollow
In a simpler way, A link marked with "external" is an external link and a link marked with "nofollow" isn't followed. A link marked with both.... is both external and not followed.

 

Thanks Guys! now i know the difference of nofollow and external nofollow.

so, external nofollow is same as a nofollow. correct?

 

commenting on blogs may not increase your google page rank but it will surely increase ur website traffic. i have experimented and seen it for my self at my blog the traffice had increase to twice with in a month .so its worth maintaing some good relationship with your niche websites and this will help you in link popularity and also may get you some valid link exchanges from the admin....all the best to all..

 

Those of you who believe Google when they say that 'nofollow' means they won't even follow the link need to grow up. There have been a number of studies done that disprove this fairly conclusively, and you can even test it yourself. Create a new page, with no incoming links whatsoever except a nofollow from one of your other pages. Watch how fast it enters the index.

Case closed.

 

It is very useful thread. I donot think google will not index nofollow. I have hundreds of robot comments in my blog with no follow external links every day.

Will it downgrade my websites ?

 

still i am not clear about that "external nofollow" and "nofollow". Can any one describe more?