May 16, 2009 | Blogging, Novice

Nofollow is an HTML element attribute promoted by Google that purportedly helps stop blog spam.

Elements and attributes

OK, let’s break that down. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language that web pages are written in. It takes normal English text, and adds additional information (called “markup”) that allows machines (computers) to take an action they otherwise wouldn’t have or display the text in a different manner.

An element is a word in the Hypertext Markup Language. Take a simple one, <i>. The action normally taken by a computer when it encounters text wrapped in an <i> element is to make the text italic. Like so:

<i>Italic text</i> results in: Italic text

An attribute is a property of an element that makes a machine treat that element somewhat differently. (Of course, you can’t really make a machine, other than your own, do anything. For example, a blog reader’s browser might be set to display all text in monospace, non-italic, single font size, regardless of attributes you set. I’m just using shorthand for saying you are requesting a machine to do such-and-such.)

Let’s take the <a> element. “A” is short for “anchor”, which defines a link. One attribute of the <a> element is the URL (address) of the link target. Like so:

<a href=”http://google.com”>Google</a> results in this: Google

The “href” (hypertext reference) is the attribute.

The problem: blog spam

OK, before we get to the nofollow attribute, let’s take a detour into what problem Google was trying to solve. The rise of Google as the number one search engine put a lot of value on a site’s PageRank, a value that reflects the number of other sites that link to your site. Google ranks sites with higher PageRank higher in its search engine page results (SERPs).

Given this, spammers started to post comments on blogs with no other purpose than advertising their spam sites. The more blog sites that had spam comments linking to a spam site, the higher it would rank in Google. This wasn’t as much of a problem before the rise of blogs and blogging because most sites before then were static with no facility for commenting.

This was a problem for bloggers as well as for Google because they had to contend with deleting spam comments.

The solution: the nofollow attribute value

So, in 2005, Google proposed adding a “nofollow” attribute value to HTML links. This works by setting the existing “rel” attribute of <a> elements to “nofollow”:

<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Spam site</a>

The attribute is “rel”, the value is “nofollow”. “Rel” indicates the relation of the link target to the current site. Note: even though “nofollow” is an attribute value, it’s commonly called an attribute or a tag.

The point of nofollow is that links with nofollow will be treated differently than links without it. Google purports to actually not follow the link and put the site it links to in its search index.  So, spammers can forget increasing their PageRank; they won’t even get into Google.

Hence, the theory goes, since they’re not getting any benefit from spam comments, they might as well not spam the blogs.

How to use nofollow

Actually, you probably don’t have to do anything to use nofollow. If you’re using any of the most common blogging or content management systems available, it likely already puts the “nofollow” attribute value in the outgoing linkadded as comments by your readers. Some systems even add “nofollow” to all outgoing links, even ones you add yourself.

To know for sure, you can just view the source of a page with comments and search for “nofollow”. If you find it, you’re using nofollow.

Problems with nofollow

This’ll be covered in a later post. Subscribe to the RSS feed (in the sidebar) for updates.

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8 Responses to “What Is NoFollow?”

1. Vendre auto says:

   July 2, 2010 at 3:17 am

   Yes, When Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when they rank websites in our search results.
2. Billy Beauty says:

   November 9, 2010 at 9:01 am

   I was wondering what nofollow meant, this has been bugging me for a while. Thanks for the info.

   BB
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   so that is what nofollow means
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