you operate a website or blog, then you’ve probably heard about Google’s stance on the ‘nofollow’ attribute lately.
But if you’re like me then you may not completely follow this development or fing it somewhat confusing. So, I decided
to do some research and will share what I learned with you here.
The first mention I could find on Google for the phrase ‘nofollow’, the number one result on Google for the keyword phrase,
was a page on the official Google blog.
Published under the title “Preventing comment spam”, you will notice it was penned by Google engineers Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen
on January 18, 2005 and refers to using the ‘nofollow’ tag primarily in cases where others add links to an author’s site
(including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists).
Referring to the then-growing problem of spam comments being left (primarily on blogs), the page states that
“from now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when
we rank websites in our search results.” It goes on to say that “We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute”.
Second result I found was a definition of the no follow attribute on Wikipedia, which refers back to the
first result and authors thereof, and then goes on to explain the attribute further. It states that
“the nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be
indexed by search engines.”
The post also states that Google takes ‘nofollow’ literally and does not ‘follow’
the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results.
They show instead that Google does follow the link, but not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index
already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).”
Third result found was written by Danny Sullivan on searchenginewatch.com circa January 18, 2005,
that states “It doesn’t mean that it is a bad link, or that you that you hate it, just that this link
doesn’t belong to me.” The article discusses the matter of ‘nofollow’ not affecting negatively on links
that use the attribute, but that “those who are swapping links with other sites now have a whole new thing to look out for”.
Next, I spent a little time looking at what
Matt Cutts has had to say about the ‘nofollow’ attribute since the 2005 introduction.
Even Cutts admits that ‘nofollow’ is imperfect, stating that it can reduce the number of relative external
links being posted legitimately on blogs, wikis, etc.
In a September 26, 2006 interview on John Battelle’s blog,
Matt Cutts states, “I’ve said this before in a few places, but I’m happy to clarify. Google does consider it a
violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines.”
He reiterated that using ‘nofollow’ on sponsor pages will ensure authors that “their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the
sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on,
but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page.”
More recently, on August 29, 2007,
Rand Fishkin posted a piece on the SEOmoz blog, in which he quotes Cutts as saying
“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity.”
Further quotes in that post include:
“Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask ‘Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?’ you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.”
Webmasters, bloggers and others who operate content-oriented Web sites will have to decide how to manage use of ‘nofollow’ carefully moving ahead.
Some have decided to use it religiously in all cases where “untrusted” links may turn up, while others have openly said
that they will disregard Google’s direction on the issue altogether.
If you have input on this subject and how you’re incorporation (or not) ‘nofollow’, please leave your comments for others to read and gain insight! |
