To Follow or Nofollow? (Full Version)

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Starhugger -> To Follow or Nofollow? (3/3/2008 15:44:23)

I'm seeing stuff about people using "nofollow" on external links, which I gather means it's an instruction to search engines to not count that link when they are tallying the target site's popularity. But I'm baffled as to why anyone would want to do this.

I've seen references to link-buying (apparently a no-no if you want your SE page rank to be taken seriously). The "nofollow" would seem to defeat the purpose of link-buying, so I guess nofollow is supposed to show that the links were not bought. But that doesn't mean all non-nofollow links are tainted that way.

Using nofollow strikes me as rather mean-spirited toward the sites you're linking to. When I exchange links with someone, it is for our mutual benefit, yes? Most of the links in my links section are link exchanges (one-to-one only; none of these weird multi-cornered schemes). I also have many links that I've added simply because I want to share the site with my viewers. I also genuinely hope that my links will help these websites, so applying the nofollow to my links would feel stingy and mean.

Am I missing something here? Why on earth would someone want to withhold a benefit of either link exchanges or one-way linking? Or is there some reason for this that I'm not seeing?

The other side of this is wondering if there is a way to know whether a site is using nofollow or not. I assume that all they have to do is put nofollow as a global style on all links into their external stylesheet and I would never know by looking at the source code whether they use it or not.

If non-nofollow links are more beneficial, I don't want to be tricked into trading links with someone who secretly uses nofollow, especially if I do not do the same. The same is true if there is an advantage in using nofollow, since I would probably want to avoid linking with sites that use it.

So I guess all this boils down to two questions:

1. What are the benefits and drawbacks of using nofollow versus not using it?

2. Is there any way for me to tell whether a site is using it or not, if it's not obvious from looking at their source code?

Thanks for the help!

Starhugger




Tailslide -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/4/2008 2:52:54)

You hard-code nofollow into the links themselves- it would be obvious from looking at the links.

I use it a fair bit - especially on blogs as I want to keep the search engine on my site not send them off elsewhere! But then I'm mean!

Obviously though if I was doing a friendly link to someone who was linking to me then I wouldn't use it.

I may be wrong but I think WordPress adds nofollow to links by default.



matthewt -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/13/2008 16:43:55)

Using nofollows in your html will give your site more quality because the SEs will take note that your site is helping the SE algorithms. For example, SEs do not like it when webmasters get credit for paid backlinks. Using nofollow will tell the SE to treat the link as a paid link and will tell the SE that the webmaster does not necessarily promote the site with the nofollow tag.



Terabytes -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/18/2008 11:16:49)

quote:

Using nofollow will tell the SE to treat the link as a paid link


Where would you even get that idea???

since you're giving away a small percentage of your page rank with each outbound link, a nofollow tells the SE to NOT FOLLOW the link and don't apply any of your page(s) credibility to that link.

example: you run a web design company, you post site thumbnails on a portfolio page. Every outbound link from that page drains a small amount of PR from that page and gives a small amount of credibility to the site that was linked to.....a helping hand sort of....

If you own a small new site, it's probably pointless to play with these....however, if you own an authority site....every outbound link is worth gold....and the nofollow allows you to link without giving up your PR...

Basically nofollow says "Here's a link...but I don't support it...and don't credit the website I linked to with a link from my site"

Tera





Mojo -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/19/2008 14:20:18)

Remember, nofollow was originally intended to help reduce certain types of (so called) search engine spam. It is now being used as a non-standard attribute to do many more things.

From SearchEngineLand (bold added):

* Google won't follow the link, Yahoo will - you don't restrict search bots to only your site by using nofollow
* Google and Yahoo won't pass link popularity for that specific link

There is nothing that indicates that your site will have more quality by using nofollow. If anything, you're telling the search engines:
1. you don't trust the content on your own site
2. you don't trust the sites that you are linking to
3. you may be admitting that you're selling links (Google wants all sold links to use nofollow)

Some people have started to use nofollow to shape the link juice within their own site. It seems to work, but it bothers me a little because it still shows you don't trust parts of your site.

Basically, it's all about TRUST.





TravelswCharlie -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/25/2008 15:53:27)

MY GOODNESS!

I thought "no follow" was to tell the search engines not to follow that page.

I was going to use it on a personal family page, to put photos where family members could see them, but it would not get indexed.

When I went to look to see how to use it, I found another term "no content"... so I thought maybe that would be the way to do it.

Is there any way to "hide" a page from search engines?




womble -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/25/2008 16:34:46)

The robots meta tag should stop SEs indexing pages/following all links on that page, e.g.:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
or
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
or
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
or
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

However, the 'index' and 'follow' are really superfluous - SEs will try to index your pages and follow links from one page to another by default anyhow.



Starhugger -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/25/2008 18:36:39)


quote:

However, the 'index' and 'follow' are really superfluous - SEs will try to index your pages and follow links from one page to another by default anyhow.

Does that mean that if you don't have any links in your site leading to a particular page, it's safe from SEbots? What if that page has a one-way link to a page that's linked into your site, but it itself has no links going to it? (Did that make sense?)

SH



Tailslide -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/26/2008 3:57:45)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Starhugger

Does that mean that if you don't have any links in your site leading to a particular page, it's safe from SEbots? What if that page has a one-way link to a page that's linked into your site, but it itself has no links going to it? (Did that make sense?)



Personally I wouldn't trust to that. If you really don't want something seen then I'd add a rule to the .htaccess file or password it.



Starhugger -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (3/26/2008 21:53:08)

Thanks Tail. The files I'm thinking of are in password-protected directories. I'll look into setting them up in htaccess too.

SH



jerry4695 -> RE: To Follow or Nofollow? (4/24/2008 3:20:09)

Well before this post I don't have much idea about No follow or Follow tags but now I understand it very well. Thanks for great information.



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