EDIT – In 2013 – You really should just nofollow your comments if you run a blog. Most blog comments come with this as default now.
“Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
Basically Google ignores links with the attribute “nofollow” on them, which allows you to link to a site and not share your websites reputation with it (we are told, by Google). On the whole – this seems to the case.
In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using
nofollowcauses us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handlenofollowin slightly different ways.
What are Google’s policies and some specific examples of nofollow usage?
Google presents us with some cases when to consider using nofollow on OUTBOUND links:
- Untrusted content: If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the
nofollowattribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.- Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use
nofollowon such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”).
Google is serious about this stuff. If you let your website become a free for all links farm – Google will not trust the links from it. You need to decide if you care about such things.
I wouldn’t bother using nofollow on internal links, though.
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I recognise that title Mickey Mouse or one of his followers hit me a couple of days ago again, but to a different site. The strange thing was the comment actually used his first name, and a gmail address along the lines of firstname.surfboarding@gmail.com Who knows, maybe it was even a genuine comment, but I need to drop the email address an email to be sure.
Re: I recognise that title – yeah, thought I’d join in on the sidelines as a bit of an experiment. :) I see Dave’s got a Shpinn in and see where you’re syndicating your content to, so it’s actually a useful face off to watch and watch what’s happening regarding ranking for the post title. Both of your sites have the quality links and link weight to out rank this site by some way, but still useful to see how I get on not pushing the post in any way off-site, if you get what I mean.
PS Regarding Micky Mouse, yeah it’s becoming a joke.
I do have it being fed to Gooruze, but that is like Technorati in many ways, hard to quantify the juice, plus Dave got a link there anyway as I linked to him at the top of my post. Lisa, Josh, and now you have linked to both of us I think Andrew just linked to me Everyone who linked to me gets a link back, as long as they ping, unless they make the mistake of using plugins such as smart update pinger which often get post updates wrong and don’t re-ping. For some reason my Gooruze profile doesn’t show any juice in the toolbar, which is odd compared to other profiles. I have linked to it in the past. Maybe they have been found to be buying or selling links. My army of splogs for some reason didn’t pick it up, they need more training. I wonder if WPN will pick it up, and use the same title just for fun.
I’m watching it all very closely…. :)
Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors… Last week, while catching up on podcasts, I listened to Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?, Jason Schwartz’s presentation from SXSW Interactive 2007 (View his slideshow). Jason crammed a lot of interesting ideas into his 25 minute presentation (t…
I’m always suspicious of things that sound like “movements” in the online marketing world. The dofollow movement, the nofollow movement, what a load of utter tosh. People have to make their own decisions, if you moderate with the carefulness of a surgeon on roller skates whilst performing a vasectomy for Mike Tyson then yeah, go the dofollow route But, if you simply haven’t got time to monitor, protect your ass. Most of us make our money online, it’s our way of earning a crust. We have to protect ourselves from comments linking to bigtitsplaypokerinbathofviagra.com Like I say, if you closely monitor comments, you should be fine. And I am sure no one would ever think to redirect those links from letallloveeachotherandbehappy.com to bigtitsplaypokerinbathofviagra.com
@ Evil Linkbaiter Lyndon, How very dare you! :)
should I change the title of my blog Post just for a laugh ;) DaveN
Might as well, you’re goin’ down (in US Google anyways) :) It’s an interesting combo face off to watch for a bit of fun…. comment dofollow, linky love & nofollow showdown. I was hoping to take you on doing nothing but on-page but some PR9 Uni in the US went and linked to me – sods law – couldn’t buy that kind of link ha ha.
co.uk domain on a US ip… it has alwsys cause me issues .. lol
We just moved the Hobo site to a UK IP, up until last month we were in Australia. Not seen any difference, probably because we already have a lot of links from UK based sites and domains.
I think the tld pulls most weight but, if you have .com 301 into your co.uk things get funky daven
Hmmm…. interesting. I was about to 301 the .com back to this domain. Can you expand what you mean by ‘Funky”?
lol ,, sometimes I rank in the co.uk and not the com, sometimes I rank in the com and not the co.uk, and some times I rank equally in both. but never the same pattern, just funky DaveN
I’m personally quite fond of the nofollow tag for blog comments, however I would only put it on over time that way you get them sucked into commenting on your blog and they just can’t stick away once you add nofollow *insert evil demon face here*
I follow, but I moderate. I guess if moderating becomes a daunting task I’ll go to no follow.
I think if you allow for a little link juice in one way, you will get it returned in another, call it Google Karma if you will.