Summary: The nofollow attribute or meta tag stops a link (or all links on a page) from passing link juice. It doesn’t actually stop the search engines from following the link!
What is the nofollow attribute (or meta tag)? This is something search engines will interpret to mean that the links that have this attribute will not pass link juice to the site receiving the link.
There are two forms – the nofollow meta tag and the nofollow attribute.
The nofollow meta tag is put in the head of your html page. It looks like this:
<meta content=”NoFollow”>
This tells search engines that none of the links on the page should pass any page rank to the websites that they link to. It does not mean the search engine will not spider those links, however (although Google say that ‘in general’ they will not follow the link).
The nofollow attribute is positioned on individual links, allowing a greater degree of control over which are given link juice and which aren’t. The format for them is:
<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.html” rel=”NoFollow”>
The effect of using this is simply that no page rank is passed on to the link. This can be useful because remember that the more sites you link to, the more that the page rank you’re passing on is diluted. So you might not want to pass your page rank on to every site you link to. If you have 20 links on a page, 17 have the nofollow and 3 don’t, you’ll pass on your passable page rank divided by 3 to each of those 3 pages.
How is nofollow used?
You’ll find nofollow is used a lot in blogs or forum posts as it puts off spammers from posting a bunch of useless comments and links to their site.
Sites like Wikipedia also use nofollow to stop people trying to get high quality links from them by just editing the wiki.
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