Nofollow Tag Affects Genuine Bloggers & Not Spammers !

Many of you will already be aware of the great debate that continues over the use of  the “nofollow” / “dofollow”  meta tags. In actual fact there is no such thing as a “dofollow” meta tag, simply by removing the “nofollow” tag  automatically makes any link a “dofollow”, but to try and use rel=”dofollow” would be incorrect.

The nofollow tag is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content from being indexed by the search engines. The correct methods for blocking search engine spiders from accessing content on a website, or for preventing them from including the contents of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt).

The introduction of the nofollow tag

Google announced in early 2005 that links with the rel="nofollow" tag would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Bing search engines also respect this attribute, Ask however, does not!

How the nofollow tag is being interpreted differs between the various search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine “Do not score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.“. For this reason a much better idea would have been to name this new tag as “norate” as opposed to “nofollow”, this would at least help remove some of the confusion with regard to this tag.

On June 15 2009, Matt Cutts, from Google, made an announcement that Google Bot will no longer treat nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent SEOs from using nofollow for PageRank Sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. In order to avoid the above, SEOs developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated Javascript and thus permit PageRank Scuplting. Additionally several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, flash and javascript.

How individual search engines read the nofollow tag

While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact meaning of the attribute still varies between individual search engines..

• Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, tests conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These tests 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.
• Yahoo “follows it”, but excludes it from their ranking calculation. (as intended)
• Bing respects “nofollow” as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not Bing follows the link.
• Ask.com ignores the tag completely.

Add to this the fact that the vast majority of social networking / bookmarking sites also now use the nofollow tag & it becomes quite clear why it is so difficult to try and acquire any number of relevant backlinks.

Many of us trudge doggedly on in the belief that if we submit our pages to the social media sites, we will acquire backlinks and therefore find our sites better ranked by the search engines. This is what Mark Nunney had to say on the subject when I asked him about it recently; 

Mark Nunney @ Wordtrackerm December 08, 2009

dofollow / nofollow: sites will not rank better with outbound links set to nofollow. nofollow links take the same share of link power as the dofollow.

Yes, it is unfair if you follow links to social sites and they nofollow back. It gets worse, promote content on a social site, eg Twitter, and your link might be shared on Twitter, linked to from Twitter and therefore not linked to with a follow link. More social links = less follow links.

That being the case one has to ask why such sites as Pro-Blogger, Hongkiat & JohnChow are still using the nofollow tag in their comments. These 3 blog sites are just 3 I stumbled upon in my search for more info on the nofollow tag, they have not been singled out for any particular reason other than examples. However if any of the owners of these blog sites can give a valid reason for using the nofollow tag, then I’m sure we would all love to hear it !

How to check if a site uses the nofollow tag in it’s comment list;

Click image to enlarge

This is quite straight forward to do, simply browse to a comment list on whatever site you are on, then click view & then source as shown in the image above. Next you get the image shown below;

Click image to enlarge

Simply click on “edit” to open the drop down menu & then select “find”, type in “nofollow” and then keep pressing next until you reach the comments section. Once you do reach the comments section, if the site uses the nofollow attribute the “nofollow” will be highlighted as in the screen shot above!

Now having found that a site is actually nofollow, what you should ask yourselves is this, do you really want to waste your time, typing in what is sometimes a lengthy comment, into a site that is not prepared to support you..? At the end of the day the use of the nofollow tag means the link juice just evaporates away, would it not be better to give this link juice to those that have supported your site by contributing to the discussions..?

Due to my research into this issue, this site has now converted and is using the dofollow plugin. We reward our fellow bloggers & use SI Captcha code instead for dealing with spam!

What are your thoughts on this issue..? do you think the social media sites are being fair in their odoption of the nofollow tag..?

Related posts:

1. Blog Comments – DoFollow – NoFollow
2. Backlinks – Search Engine Ranking & SEO
3. Alexa Ranking – How To Improve Tip 4
4. Bounce Rate
5. Comment Policy – Rejected Comments