Wednesday, September 21, 2011

SEO: Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links

3:49 PM | Posted by DOTA | | Edit Post
Combat comment spam with "nofollow"
Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page' s reput ati on to the pages l i nked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag (1).

<a href="http://www.shadyseo.com" rel="nofollow">Comment spammer</a>

(1) If you or your site's users link to a site that you don't trust and/or you don't want
to pass your site's reputation, use nofollow.

When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam (2). Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.

(2) A comment spammer leaves a message on one of our blogs posts, hoping to get some of our site's reputation.

Automatically add "nofollow" to comment columns and message boards
Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this. This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guestbooks, forums, shoutboards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (e.g. if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site. The Webmaster Help Center has more tips on avoiding comment spam, like using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation (3).

(3) An example of a CAPTCHA used on Google's blog service, Blogger. It can present a challenge to try to ensure an actual person is leaving the comment.

About using "nofollow" for individual contents, whole pages, etc.
Another use of nofollow is when you're writing content and wish to reference a website, but don't want to pass your reputation on to it. For example, imagine that you're writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don't want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a good time to use nofollow.

Lastly, if you're interested in nofollowing all of the links on a page, you can use "nofollow" in your robots meta tag, which is placed inside the <head> tag of that page's HTML (4). The Webmaster Central Blog provides a helpful post on using the robots meta tag. This method is written as <meta name="robots" content="nofollow">.

<html>
<head>
<title>Brandon's Baseball Cards - Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
<meta name="description=" content="Brandon's Baseball Cards provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events in">
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">
</head>
<body>

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