Follow or No-Follow Links – Why Use them and Do They Work?

One thing that continues to puzzle many bloggers, web authors and site owners, is when to use rel=”nofollow” within links to external sites, and when to leave it out. And some simply ask, what is rel=”nofollow”?

Well, rel=”nofollow”, or the no follow link, was introduced by Google to allow site owners to tell the search engines to ignore links that could potentially be spam. The nofollow tag is generally automatically placed on a link out to another website, whenever it is posted on a form by a third party. For example, the comment forms on most blogs are nofollow, as are the many internet forums and chat rooms, which are often spammed by desperate website owners who are looking to make a fast buck.

Why is nofollow needed?

A few years ago, Google developed a new way of indexing and rating websites, which was its PageRank algorithm method. Google decided that as the web grew, manually reviewing sites for quality of content became impossible, so instead a site would be rated better if more people linked to it. This seemed logical in the early days of the internet, because people used to link to the best sites. In fact, before the first search engine was ever built, links were the only way to find new pages. This gave rise to the human created web directories, some of which are still going strong today, such as the Yahoo! Directory.

However, once people realised that more links led to higher “ranking”, a mad crazed battle started with people building links to their sites in any way possible. This initially led to “Google bombing” whereby people would link to sites en masse to either benefit a site or mock. Once blogs and forums became more popular, with the growth of PHP/MySQL content management systems, “comment spam” started to grow. This started out with individuals manually adding comments, which included a link to their own website, on other peoples blogs, which were designed not to add value to the blog, but only benefit themselves. At the same time, “link dropping” in forum threads became a popular pastime for many. Quickly the spammers started to out rank more respected websites. More inventive spammers started building computer programs (know as spambots) to seek comment forms and forums, and automatically sign in and link drop. The more advanced spambots were designed to bypass security settings, email verification and even some CAPCHTA.

So, the solution? To add rel=”nofollow” to the link, which tells search engines not to look at that link. The rel=”nofollow” tag allows a website owner to tell the search engines (in an automated way) that the link in question is not one that has been reviewed, and therefore could potentially be spam. Once spammers know that sites use rel=”nofollow”, they stop spamming those sites.

Many blogging platforms now use nofollow as standard, included, but by no means limited to, LiveJournal, Six Apart, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Technorat and  Drupal. There are many others too.

The good news is that for many webmasters, the nofollow can be switched off, or removed individually. For example, the comments on this site are nofollow by default, however I can easily remove the nofollow tag from selected links should I feel that they are of value and should be found more easily by others.

What types of links should get this attribute?

Google and the other search engines now encourage you to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute anywhere that users can add links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay.

Has it stopped spamming?

No. Many people are very much against nofollow too, as they feel that Google is dictating how they should link. But spammers still leave links, knowing that people will still see them and click them – even if they get no search engine optimisation out of them. But it certainly helps. Although now SEO forums are often found sharing lists of websites that do not have nofollow as default on their links, which means some poor souls who have not updated their CMS’s for a while are receiving unprecendented levels of spam.

For more information see Google’s guide to using the nofollow tag.

Tags: no follow, nofollow