NoFollow Tag

Posted by Pixelhead

“No Follow” tags are not necessarily a bad thing. Unless of course you are looking for links to improve your search engine rankings by getting links to your site, either one way or reciprocal, then the links you get are pretty much useless if the “no follow” command is being utilized. Many directories that many webmasters submit their sites to use these no follow tags, not all directories but some. It is something that webmasters or anyone who is trying to build a web presence should be aware of when determining a links value. In a number of directories that I deal with, the “No follow” is used in the free submission, but not the paid submissions. I believe it is a good practice for webmasters of directories to disclose the use of them, and many do, but again, not all.
How do I know if a site is using a “no follow” tag?

Are you familiar with the source code function? If you are, go into the source code, do a Ctrl+f(find comand)and type in “no follow”, and click the find button. If it comes up in the code of your link a link like the one you may potentially get, the site is utilizing the” No follow” command. The links are useless for SEO. Don’t waste your time, unless it happens to be a link on a high traffic page.

What you have never heard of the Source code or have no clue how to view it? In your browser, click the view button at the top, go down in the drop menu and click view source. The resulting page is a view of the inner workings of the page you are viewing. You can also get to the source code by right clicking on a blank space on the page, and then scrolling down to the view source link.

Once in the source code follow the instructions in the preceding paragraph to find out if the page is using “No Follow” tags.

What does a “No Follow” tag do?

The “No follow” tag keeps the search engine spiders from following the link.

Search engine spiders, what the heck is that?

Search engine spiders refers to the programs or algorhtyms that the search engines use to gather information about all the sites out on the Internet. It isn’t really a spider as in the little critters that crawl into your mouth while you sleep.

Why use a “no follow” tag?

There may be a file that is on your site that you may not want spiders or search engines to visit, similar to a robot.txt, it will keep spiders out of secured areas of a site.
Blogs use them in there comments section links to deter spammers. This is a relatively recent standard tool for blog owners.
It has also been implemented by wiki’s including Wikipedia – to prevent the deluge(oh I love that word) of spammers looking to increase their search engine rankings with a highly valuable link.

Thanks to Lizzie Bean whom I consulted with on this post.

Written by Pixelhead on February 14th, 2007 with comments disabled.
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Lizzie Bean
#1. February 14th, 2007, at 10:44 PM.

A good example of the use of the NO FOLLOW tag can be found on this site – http://shutters.guidecentral.com/. This is a directory where you can submit a site for inclusion, BUT they require a reciprocal link back to their site AND the link they give your site has the NO FOLLOW attribute. This gives them the benefit of the incoming link and they, in return give you a link that has no value.

Pixelhead
#2. February 14th, 2007, at 10:52 PM.

I really dislike sites that do that. Wonder if the site owner is doing this intentionally or has no clue he is giving a NO FOLLOW link. Perhaps someone should send him an email and ask him…hmm

Oh, Lizzie, I just realized(duh) that by right clicking on a link then scrolling down to properties, that a little box with all the link info, to include the NO FOLLOW tag will appear. A little bit easier than going into the source code. But source code is fun to delve into anyway.

IBS Pro!
#3. April 11th, 2008, at 7:09 AM.

One thing that still remains a mystery to me is external nofollow, does the crawler still count it?

Logo Design Guru
#4. June 12th, 2008, at 5:16 AM.

Are you successfully able to fight do follow spam on your blog?
http://www.logodesignguru.com/

Pixelhead
#5. June 12th, 2008, at 6:30 PM.

I have had to come up with a commenting policy to help fight comment spam. As part of my commenting policy, I don’t normally give out links to sites without blogs. I liked your logos so I put your url in your comment LDG.

Logo Design Guru
#6. June 16th, 2008, at 9:06 AM.

Thanks Mr. Pixelhead!Our site has a blog too, located at http://blog.logodesignguru.com/, by the way.

Joel Drapper
#7. September 17th, 2008, at 10:48 AM.

I really hate the nofollow tag. Because it was intended to stop spammers, and I guest I just really hate spammers.

I hole purpose of search engine spiders counting links as votes for a site was to count links as votes for a site, so why did they come up with it anyway?

I really hate it when sites like twitter, and wikipedia just become a page rank black hole by adding nofollow to all their external links. It just isn’t fair. People that wikipedia link to deserve the rankings they would get.

chris
#8. October 14th, 2008, at 12:50 AM.

had to come up with a commenting policy to help fight comment spam. As part of my commenting policy

Mike worst
#9. May 19th, 2009, at 6:03 PM.

I think that fighting the spam would be a more logical way of doing this. The spam bots insert indentical info on their travels and I would have thought that google could detect this as it detects duplicate content and penalises for that.