There is lots of posting done on internet about ‘nofollow’ attribute and whether to use it or not. For those who don’t know about ‘nofollow’ or the ‘link condom’ (as they call it), this is the brief description.
‘Nofollow’ makes sure that the page rank or link juice will not be transferred to the outbound links from the page that is hosting them. There are two ways to add the ‘nofollow’ attribute to the links on a page.
Locally you can add the ‘nofollow’ attribute only to specific links like,
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.link.com”>link text</a>
Or you can do it globally via Meta tag, and make all the links inside that page nofollowed,
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
Every body knows, what it takes to earn a page rank or good back links to your site…so if you think your page rank as your property then you must have a right to share it with good neighbors and stop the benefit to flow to worthless or bad outbound links…’nofollow’ does it for you! If you want to know more about how different search engines respond to ‘nofollow’ tag, a good resource ‘search engine journal’ has got a post.
Now there are lots of controversies and disbelieves on use of ‘nofollow’ especially after Google followed by other engines, announced the ‘nofollow’ attribute to the world as a solution to the comment spam problem. After going through all the discussions on different forums and expert blogs hereby I am posting the situations I believe, are ideal to use ‘nofollow’.
- When linking out to questionable sites or content you are not sure about the quality, for e.g. suspected blog comments.
- When linking to the same page many times from one page looking like you are trying to spam.
- To the paid links i.e. when somebody buys advertisement on your blog/site.
- When the page at the end of the link should not be crawled for e.g. a login link leading to a password protected area.
At most of the places you will get to read that, ‘nofollow’ should also be used when linking to internal pages that don’t need Page Rank. For e.g. contact us, privacy policy etc. but such a use of ‘nofollow’ may create orphaned pages in your root directory. So you need to take care of outbound links on such pages, those links will not be found by bots unless they are present elsewhere. Any ways the low priority to some pages could be said through XML sitemap on your website, it saves you from any drawback of using nofollow tag on internal links.
Visit this link, to know more about how Google treats nofollow tag and attribute.
