Home > ramiro's blog > Is rel=nofollow Achieving the Desired Effect?

Is rel=nofollow Achieving the Desired Effect?

Posted: Mon 11/06/2006 by ramiro

More and more blogs, link directories, and other types websites tend to add the rel="nofollow" attribute to external links to tell search engines not to follow them, meaning that the Google PageRank is not inherited by the externally linked pages.

Clearly this is bad from an SEO perspective for the external pages but may have a positive effect for the internal website links, because they receive more value. This seems somewhat egoistic but hey we all know that money makes the world go round and website owners will argue that they only do it for spam prevention.

Actually I don't believe that this prevents spam but only helps Google etc. to filter out potentially spammy sites. Webmasters using this attribute could be considered Google servants.

Using browser extensions, such as SEO for Firefox or Search Status lets you highlight exactly those links to expose pages where rel="nofollow" is used.

You can also use this to see which link directories add value for your site or not. Considering that most of them won't bring much traffic to your site anyway this is an additional argument not to pay for services that promise to submit your site to hundreds or even thousands of directories and search engines.

To sum up the benefits of rel="nofollow":

  • it saves money, because you don't need to pay for submission services
  • it saves time, because you don't need to leave comments on websites where its in use
  • it saves bandwidth, because your site is not spidered that much
  • using tools to highlight those links draws more attention to them from human users

To sum up the drawbacks of rel="nofollow":

  • your site does not inherit PageRank
  • only SEOs use such browser extensions

My conclusion is that rel="nofollow" has more negative effects for the vast majority of website owners than positve ones. To me this attribute is not compatible with the concept of hypertext.

To visualize the sinisterness of rel="nofollow" install Search Status highlight those links and go to your del.icio.us bookmarks page. I promise, you won't visit that page again.

Submitted by Andy Beard (not verified) on Tue, 11/07/2006 - 11:32.
I just wrote a long reply, hit preview and lost everything :( So here is a shorter reply. Most blogs are a mess as far as linking structure, and honestly nofollow on comments should be the least of their worries. The uncontrolled linking "ball" structure actually prevents most of the PR being wasted to external links. If you have 50 people on a blogroll, especially if they are not reciprocating, links in comments are an extremely small issue. If you haven't read it, Revenge of the Mininet, and the bonus "Dynamic Linking" ebook are exceptionally good reads. I include a link to it in the following article on my blog. Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow The article discusses how PR can be controlled to some extent on a blog, and gives hints to what might be possible in the future.
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Submitted by Andy Beard (not verified) on Tue, 11/07/2006 - 11:35.
That is what you get when you write things twice, this link should work. Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow
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Submitted by John Cammidge (not verified) on Mon, 12/11/2006 - 14:15.
I agree using it for spam comments and on certain forums but not for every outbound link (what are people hiding from?)
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Submitted by Hitech Dolphin (not verified) on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 10:44.
The global use of the nofollow attribute in my hebrew website-building blog seems to be one of the reasons for it's PR6 status. My policy is that people who want a regular link should generally give something back. This allows me to approve more content, not being afraid that the PR will go out. Indeed, I get less content, since people have less motivation to write.
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