If you're just now getting into SEO there's a chance you're not even aware of what nofollow is. Even if you've been around for a while, you might not really know how to use nofollow to your advantage. While many have railed against its use at all, the plain fact of the matter is that it's a reality that webmasters and SEOs are going to have to deal with. With that in mind, let's cover some of the basics first.
1. What is nofollow?
Nofollow is an html attribute which tells search robots to not follow the link. So, for example if there's an element on your site that you don't want to be indexed by a search robot, adding the nofollow attribute to the link will tell the robot to just keep on moving along without indexing the page it links to.
2. Why would I want to use nofollow on a link?
Well, there are a few reasons, but the two that pop in my mind are to optimize the distribution of PageRank, use targeted anchor text, avoid duplicate content penalties and to avoid indexing irrelevant content. So let's break these down. As far as PageRank (or link juice distribution if you want to be more politically correct), each page has a certain amount to distribute, so sometimes you want to spread that "juice" from an authoritative page to one that is not seen as an authoritative page. So, each page has only so much juice to spread, so the more links you have on that page, the less the amount of juice being passed to those pages. So in some instances, it makes sense from a usability standpoint to add a link to another authoritative page, but it may not make sense from and SEO standpoint. In these cases, adding a nofollow attribute to the link will save link juice for other pages that may be in greater need for it.
There has been a variety of studies that also show that search engines may only count the first link if you have multiple links on a page pointing to the same location. In this case, you may have to work around navigational elements, visual callouts or other text links in place for usability.
The screen shot above demonstrates how we utilize nofollow on our own page (this screenshot uses the Firefox nodofollow plugin), where we nofollow the links (highlighted in pink) below our Flash animation, as we chose to use the anchor text Michigan SEO and paid search management (highlighted in purple) as our anchor text pointing to those pages.
Duplicate content can happen on occasion if you've got multiple similar landing pages that you still want to link to, or other similar pages. Adding nofollow can save you from the negative effects of duplicate content.
Irrelevant content? Why would you put it on your site if it's irrelevant? Well, from an SEO standpoint, some pages may exist only for legal reasons or for human eyes, such as terms of use. Sometimes it may make sense to nofollow these pages as well.
3. So what does the nofollow attribute actually look like in html?
It's easy to use and can be added to basically any link you have on your site. Taking a peak at some different code examples, they look a bit like this:
<a href="http://walkietalkie.com">Walkie Talkie</a>
That would be a standard link, linking "Walkie Talkie" to the walkietalkie.com website. If you wanted to nofollow the link, you would make a slight addition to the code:
<a href="http://walkietalkie.com" rel="nofollow">Walkie Talkie</a>
That's really all there is to it. Of course, there are other methods to do this, like using robots.txt, but this can be a great way to achieve any of the ends discussed in point 2. But keep in mind, just like you would when using robots.txt, that you don't cut off any critical paths for spiders when using the nofollow attribute.
Anything else we should have covered? Please feel free to comment below.
