Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Why rel=”nofollow” link tag is used?

I am back with new topic on rel=”nofollow” link tag. Most of the people don’t know why nofollow tag is used but who know having a little information about it. You can find many explanations online on nofollow tag. Here is one 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.”

Most of the Search Engines except Google ignore this tag. However, do you think this is the only reason to use nofollow tag in any hyperlink? If you think so, you are wrong. If website really wants to prevent search engine spam coming through comments or link submissions, it should stop offering links by such methods but it is not possible because such websites are increasing their keyword density in shade of rel=”nofollow" tag. This process helps such websites to be reliable in eyes of Google. Google thinks that they are doing right by preventing such websites doing spamming through comments and link submission. I hope now you all can understand real use of nofollow tag.

I would like to suggest you all link builders not to do link building with blogs or websites using nofollow tag because it will not help you any more but help them you are linking to. If you are doing so, just wasting your time and making yourself and client fool. It will not help you rank higher in Google any more but can decrease your ranking from previous one.

Anybody having query or suggestion please let me know by commenting or mailing me.

Note: In this article, I just wrote what I understand about nofollow. I am not against of any SEO guru or online resource.

5 comments:

hypeemcee said...

You can use No Follow tag for Allowing the Page Rank to flow on the pages you want and blocking others. :)

Its called PageRank Sculpting. I have discussed it in detail on my blog.

Nicely written post Lalit!

Dharak Sandeep said...

nofollow tag is very important to increase out page rank, some of links which we post on blog or comment may be defined by nofollow so we can manage out inbound and outbound link weight age.
by daily seo updates

Ravi Kant said...

lalit yaar i m doing SEO last 1 year & having knowledge about Article,directory,social bookmarking,metatags writing and little bit more.Now suggest me how would i do for more in this field.

Ravi Kant Sharma

ServerAdministrator said...

that's really a fantastic post ! added to my favourite blogs list.. I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks.

ServerAdministrator said...

that's really a fantastic post ! added to my favourite blogs list.. I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks.