rel-nofollow
status
Editors
Description
rel-nofollow uses a rel value of “no-follow” for links to external resources to indicate that search engines should not use the link to give additional pagerank to the linked page. Search engines such as Google typically use the number and authority of inbound links to a page to rank its place in search results.
rel-nofollow introduced by Google in an attempt to address the issue of link spam particularly in blog comments, is not without controversy. A thorough criticism can be found at http://www.nonofollow.net/.
Usage
To use rel-nofollow add a rel value of “nofollow” to links.
Examples
To link to a page while indicating to search engines that the link should not add to the linked page’s pagerank, use the form
<a href="http://westciv.com" rel=”nofollow”>Style Master</a>
Tools
Many blogging systems automatically add rel=”nofollow” to links in comments, or make this feature available through plugins or other extension mechanism.
- Wordpress 1.5 and higher automatically adds nofollow to user submitted comment links. There are plugins to diable this feature includind “dofollow” and “Follow URL”
- Moveabletype and Textpattern both requires a plugin to enable rel-nofollow on user submitted comments
Services using
Recent research indicates that
- Google follows links with no-follow but does not index the linked page
- MSN does not follow the link nor index the page linked
- Yahoo! both follows the link and indexes the page linked
[tags]microformats, rel-nofollow[/tags]
