nofollow
Sign in to saveAlso known as rel="nofollow", rel-nofollow, no follow
nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.
~7 min read
Article
11 sectionsContents
- Concept and specification
- Example
- Introduction and support
- Interpretation by the individual search engines
- Use by websites
- Repurpose
- Control internal PageRank flow
- Qualified outbound links
- See also
- Blocking and excluding content from search engines
- References
nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.
==Concept and specification== The nofollow value was originally suggested to stop comment spam in blogs. Believing that comment spam affected the entire blogging community, in early 2005 Google's Matt Cutts and Blogger's Jason Shellen proposed the value to address the problem.