Nofollow links + FF plugin

No follow tags are getting more and more famous nowadays. Hence, a lot of misunderstand is involving this term.

Created by Matt Cutts (surprise) and Jason Shellen, the nofollow-tag topic is flooding all SEO and Blogging forums.

One of the main problems for new bloggers or even for some SEO’s is what the benefits of adding nofollow tags are?

Nofollow tags tell Google bot not to follow a particular link, therefore, the Google bot won’t be able to follow it… NOT! Wrong.

Nofollow tags just prevent a link to get a vote from the linker, consequently, no Pagerank will be transferred throughout the link.

But in fact, the link will be followed and crawled by the spider. Moreover, the site will be indexed.

This is why people don’t see differences between nofollow and noindex. Let me give you a few examples.

<a href=”[insert website url here]” rel=”nofollow”>Make money blogging</a>

The bot will both follow and index the site, but you, as the linker, won’t pass on any Pagerank juice nor a vote. You’re just saying “Hey, here’s a site, but its content is not my responsibility”

<a href=”[insert website url here]” Make money blogging</a>

Normal link. The spider will follow, crawl, index and transfer Pagerank to the site. You’re just saying “Hey, I know this site, there’s no problem with it “

Folks are confused about that because of the no index tag, which is a different attribute that, this time, tells Google bot not to index a page or a site, as an example:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />

But links will be followed, so how to avoid passing a vote and not indexing?

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

So why would you want to use nofollow tags?

When the information is useless for an internet bot or uncrawlable, or when you don’t want to be “associate” with the page you’re linking to.

For example, if you’ve a registration form or you’re going to link to a doubtful content.

So what are the benefits? Protection. You’ll protect yourself when linking to unsure content, avoiding penalties. You don’t want to put nofollow tags everywhere, just if you don’t feel confident about the site you’re linking to.

Additional content:

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to increase Pagerank. If you’ve understood how nofollow works, then you may have guessed that indexing your blog onto directories which have nofollow tags won’t send you any Pr. Apart from checking the source code and looking for nofollow tags you can download this Firefox Plugin which automaticly highlight you whether there’s a nofollow or not.

Download the Plugin here.

Thanks for reading.

Tagged as: SEO

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