What Are NoFollow Links?

Matt Cutts, Google guy, is back with a new Webmasters Help clip. This time about “no follow” links.

By “no follow” links he means links with the “Nofollow” attribute, which is added to the code of individual links. This “Nofollow” tag allows site owners to tell the search engines to not follow the link, meaning don’t visit the destination site, and most importantly to not count this link as a “yes” vote for the destination’s link popularity or factor it into their PageRank score. There is also a nofollow meta tag, which is used to tell the engines to not follow links on an entire page of a website.

Use of the nofollow tag began in 2005 and was encouraged as a method of preventing link spam abuse and other “black hat” link techniques that were getting out of hand. Many websites where visitors could post a link were highly abused by spammers and some SEOs, so the nofollow attributes and tags were suggested for these situations. It’s also common for site owners to use them when they want to protect themselves from any possible penalties a search engine may throw at them for linking to “bad neighbourhoods”. Adding “NoFollow” to a link is you telling the search engines “I am not vouching for this link.”

But, with every new method comes new problems. I think I disagree with Matt when he states that “it turns out, that’s a really small percentage” of “NoFollow” links on the web. I’d like to see that statement backed up with something, because I think that number has increased. A LOT.

It actually seems like there’s a small epidemic of inappropriate “NoFollow” links occurring. So many sites are littered with no follow links now. There’s a lot of misinformation out there that has caused some people to believe linking out AT ALL will harm their website’s search engine rankings, and that any outbound links on your site will decrease the value of inbound links. That linking to another site, even a site that you trust completely and is highly relevant to your content will somehow damage your standing at Google.

It’s even quite common for sites to have “NoFollow”s all over their internal site links, in an attempt to improve their site’s PageRank score using a technique they’ve dubbed “PageRank sculpting” – which is a whole other crazy mess we also have Google to blame for. Google has come out a few times and called this “sculpting” concept a bad idea, but unfortunately people never really believe them, so on it goes.

This video contains the usual message from Google about good and compelling content being the only thing that matters, which seems to be their answer to almost any question. Yes, the way to encourage unsolicited links from a variety of sources IS to create great content, however, more and more of those are ending up being of the no follow variety. Which they may need to readdress down the road.