What is NoFollow?

Nofollow is a HTML attribute assigned to Hyperlinks as a measure to prevent spam by instructing Search Engines to ignore the link for ranking purposes.

In 2005 the head of Google’s Web Spam team Matt Cutts along with Jason Shellen from Blogger.com designed the concept for the Nofollow attribute and filed a Royalty Free Patent policy as per the W3C.

The three major engines Google, Yahoo and MSN recognize the Nofollow tag but treat it slightly differently. I see alot of misconception regarding the Nofollow attribute amongst webmasters and even SEO’s, so the need to write up this short article.

Firstly a bit about Nofollow and it’s uses. It’s not advisable to use Nofollow to restrict access to content, in this case a Robots.txt file should be used.

No write a NoFollow link, the following is used on a Hyperlink:

<a href="http://www.seoxp.net" rel="nofollow">SEO Experts</a>

Nofollow is primarily used to prevent giving weight to non-editorially verified links, links you can’t vouch for or don’t wish to pass authority to.
Ask.com is the only primary engine which ignores the Nofollow attribute, the other engines treat Nofollow as such:

Hopefully this will help clear up the general treatment of the No-Follow rule.

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