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George from glrsales -

Another good idea if you are interested in nofollows is to use firefox and add the userContent.css as described in the link below.

That will highlight all the nofollow links on everypage you visit with an dashed outline and pinkish background. Saves doing a view source to check everypage.

Whether you are for, against or undecided about the nofollow tag this will let you see how it is used as you casually surf the web.

• See no follow tags

Comment #1 SomeoneAwful from The World -

What does a nofollow tag new? Why is Matt Cutt blogging about it; I thought all he blogged about was SEO stuff. Does nofollow have something to do with SEO?

Comment #2 George from glrsales -

Nofollow was touted as an anti-spam measure.

If you put rel="nofollow" in your href tags then the search engines are supposed to ignore the link. (It is actually not new, as there is a nofollow meta tag which would instruct the search engines to ignore all the links on the page).

The no-spam aspect is that if forums and blogs used nofollow on the urls in comments, spammers wouldn't post crap comments to get links.

On the SEO side... if you add your link to a directory that uses nofollows, it will not produce any SEO benefit for you.

Some have the belief that links off your site bleed page rank and therefore it is better to use nofollow on everything to keep your page rank. I don't go for that theory as taken to the extreme it would mean is 100% of links on the web were nofollow, everybody would rank higher. That is of course impossible because the web is LINKS.

What is interesting is how nofollows are actually used when you visually see them with that CSS mod above.

If you look at del.icio.us for example, I think you'll find that every link off their site has nofollow. So bookmarking something there isn't going to help you in the search engines.

p.s. we don't use nofollows here because we feel it is unnatural (a link is a link) and it is better to keep the messages clean of unrelated junk.

Comment #3 Jenna from Sunny Florida -

Thanks for the info George. I thought that nofollow was purely for SEO and just told the search engines to ignore that page and not even index it. I didn't realize that it goes down to the link level and that it can stop spam on comments. Only sad thing is if you have legitimate comments they don't get indexed then, but there is so much SPAM out there, what can you do.

Comment #4 Free Directory from Real Free Open Directory -

I'm completely agree with George.

Sites that use nofollow it's only a grab link stuff. Noone benefits from that. Lot of directories use that nofollow to constrain people to provide a backlink to them. My personal thoughs make me shiver. Why shall we force? Noone benefits.

My own directory does not 'know' what's nofollow:) (it's not a promotion, just a way of thinking)

About legitimation of comments, i think they can be filtered by admins, and if you set a good privacy & rule page, noone will complains.

Hehe, at least spam bots does not:))

• Real Open Free directory

Comment #5 Peter N. from Blaenavon, South Wales -

Google will follow a rel="nofollow" attribute - it does not make the link invisible to spiders or persuade them to ignore it. All it means is that no page rank will be awarded to the target web page for the link.

However, some robots will refuse to follow a 'nofollow' attribute. It's a bit confused, but Googlebot will follow it.

The only way to stop Googlebot spidering a page is to use 'nofollow' in your robots meta tag on that page, or name the page in the robots.txt file.

I have just read about a --URL-- html tag that can be used to hide a single link to spiders-I must pursue that. Anybody come across it?

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Comment #6 Peter N. from Blaenavon, South Wales -

I just oticed the post did not include the html I gave. the nofollow tag I mentioned at the end was nofollow - URL - /nofollow in html tags. They don't seem to show up here!

Comment #7 Nancy from Los Angeles -

Any kind of nofollow... that stops rank or stops spiders is contrary to the essence of the "web". What is a web without the links? Zip, Zero, Nada.

Comment #8 john illnes (81.196.163.122) -

The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.

i think it helps indexing

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Comment #9 Fred from NYC -

If nofollow doesn't influence rankings, how does it help with indexing?

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