Should You Fear or Follow the nofollow Folly?


There's a new html tag in town. It's very powerful. And you need to know about it... for better or worse, it changes everything!

Should You Fear or Follow the nofollow Folly?

((Even though this question has been addressed in many other publications, due to the volume of questions I've received, (over 70) I've decided to provide my own take on the situation.))

So what's all the fuss about?.. There's a new html tag in town. It's very powerful. And you need to know about it... for better or worse, it changes everything!

Simply put, old static hypertext links used to look like this:

href="http://www.cdzn.com"> Normal Link</a>

The new nofollow links look like this:

href="http://www.cdzn.com" rel="nofollow"> Nofollow Link</a>

This new html "tag" invented by Google and - soon to be - adopted by all the other major search engines has one purpose, to stop their spiders from following the link.

They created it to stop blog spamming, which was a huge problem. For a long time people were using automated tools to add "me too" type comments into high PR blogs, along with a link back to their page. Needless to say it was an easy way to get high PR sites linking back to you.

However, the bigger problem and bigger concerns don't just involve blogging. The nofollow tag works anywhere, anyhow, in any link, so you can use it on any web page.

Think about that power for a second... with a single little tag you can absolutely block a search engine spider from crawling... an affiliate link, a linking partner, a private page, anything you want.

Gee, it sounds a lot like Dynamic Linking... the bonus ebook that comes with Revenge of the Mininet... where Leslie Rohde - the author - used Javascript to achieve the one way links. Guess what kids? We now we have an easier method that's actually "endorsed" by the major search engines.

So yes, you'll need to more careful than ever, when exchanging or buying incoming links. If you're linking with strangers, you'd be wise to check the html source code for nofollow links. You'll still get human traffic, but you won't get any link popularity, PR (PageRank) or page Reputation aimed at your pages.

(You can automate the link checking chore with OptiLink. If they're using nofollow links, their links won't show up.)

The other side of the nofollow tag, is that you can take advantage of it inside your own web sites. Think about all the low value, or no money pages on your site... pages like about us, where to find us, contact us. Every link leaving your home page "bleeds" PageRank to those pages and you'll want to stop that!

Instead of using normal static hyperlinks you can use nofollow links instead. This lets the "human mouse clicking visitor" find the pages on their own, but totally blocks the search engine from finding them.

So not only can you provide visitors with a rich user experience, you can conserve your PageRank and link popularity within your home page.

So why is that a good thing? You can aim your PR and link popularity at your important money making product pages... The ones YOU choose!

For example, let's say you're still doing links the old way. You have a PR4 on your home page and 4 links lead off that page. That gives each of the 4 outgoing links a "vote" of 1 point.

Now (drumroll please) with nofollow linking, three of the four links can be blocked from being spidered by the search engines, and all four "votes" or ranking points aimed at one page. The page of your choice.

To paraphrase OptiLink's creator Leslie Rohde, "The search engines never intended to create the poor man's Dynamic Linking or Dynamic Linking for the masses, but by adding the nofollow tag, they've done just that."

Whether Google and the other search engines will become wise to the sleeping giant they woke, only time will tell. They gave us the nofollow tag and they can certainly change their minds and take it away.

The good new is, if you're the slightest bit worried about doing Dynamic Linking the new nofollow way, you can still do it the old fashioned way using Javascript, as described in Revenge of the Mininet and its companion ebook Dynamic Linking. They are full of linking diagrams and linking strategies.

But should you use it? That depends... Do you want to control which pages get spidered? Do you want to decide which pages are more important than others? Do you want to aim your link popularity and PR at the pages you choose?

Yes... as you can see, it's a very powerful concept and the choice is clearly yours. So let me ask you, which type of linking are you going to use?

Posted: Fri - March 25, 2005 at 12:51 PM          





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