SEO Basics Part 5: No Follow Tags
Posted on | September 20, 2008 | 5 Comments
The no follow tag is a special attribute that is added to links to inform search engines that your site does not “vote” for a particular site or that a page within your site is not as important and you don’t want to pass any authority to them. This type of tag has many uses. You can use no follow tags to preserve link juice within your site. For example, you can add them to links in your pages that are of lesser importance and that you do not necessarily need them to perform well on search engines. Some of these pages might include contact us, about pages, disclaimers, privacy policies and so on. SEOs believe that authority flows from backlinks to your site and is distributed within your site through internal links and other navigational structures. This strategy will help concentrate authority within the important pages that you want to rank well in search engines with.
You can should use this tags in outgoing links that you do not endorse, affiliate links and any paid links if you happen to be Google paranoid or if you are linking to bad neighborhoods like link farms or any site that is banned from a search engine to avoid being penalized yourself. And of course their originally intended use, to avoid comment spam if you happen to own a blog. Linking to a bad neighborhood may even get you banned from a search engine completely, protect your site.
How do I use it?
Here is how a regular text link looks like:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com”>Text</a>
Adding this tag is easy. Just add rel=”nofollow” in the html of the link after the url. So our tagged link looks like:
<a href=”http://www.domain.com” rel=”nofollow”>Text</a>
Any experiences with these types of tags? What do you use them for?
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5 Responses to “SEO Basics Part 5: No Follow Tags”
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October 1st, 2008 @ 1:11 am
[...] SEO Basics Part 5: No Follow Tags [...]
October 29th, 2008 @ 11:44 am
It is nice that you have pointed out, using code, the right way to use no-follow tags. This can be beneficial to prevent links that could be harmful to a site because Google does not support their destination. One would not want to come back to their site to see it diminished due to a negative link.
November 7th, 2008 @ 2:02 am
@ Armen
Thanks for dropping by. No follow tags can be used to redirect link juice to pages. These statement is debated in the SEO community but I once read an article that said that Matt Cutts stated that it was ok Google wise.
January 2nd, 2009 @ 10:27 am
[...] in the process. Other benefits from forums included on the list are that they allow signatures with no follow tag removed from them (great backlinks) and of course revenue [...]
July 10th, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
definitely a good point im usually all for do follow tags but when the situation is right the use of no follow tags is completely reasonable.