Rel nofollow – Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial
Script:
Welcome to the SEO Video Blog.
Following from our web design video blog we were discussing the use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute to disallow a search engine taking in consideration the page indexed where the link lands on and to stop any page rank being passed on.
One thing we mentioned was when a javascript action changes the content of a web page, but the URL doesn’t change. This can cause search engines seeing multiple versions of the same webpage., which can cause performance issues within the search results.
We have experienced this when ecommerce shops have multi currency functionality. So the currency changes but the rest of the content stays the same.
So what is it?
The no follow attribute is a HTML value used to instruct Google and some other search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target ranking.
It is simple addition to a <a href=””> HTML link.
It was designed by Matt Cutts the head of Google web spam team and Jason shellen from blogger.com. Developed in 2005 it is often used to stop users spam commenting on blogs forums or groups.
An example of the no-follow attribute would be:
Tutorial – showing blog comments on Creare Design and source.
It also worth knowing how each search engine interoperates it:
· Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).
· Yahoo! “follows it”, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
· Bing respects “nofollow” as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not Bing follows the link.
(Information taken from wikipedia)
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
