nofollow

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link's target in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of internet advertising because their search algorithm depends heavily on the number of links to a website when determining which websites should be listed in what order in their search results for any given term.

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.[1][2]

The specification for nofollow is copyrighted 2005–07 by the authors and subject to a royalty-free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy 20040205,[3] and IETF RFC 3667 & RFC 3668.[2]

Example

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Link text</a>

Introduction and support

Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow"[4] would not influence the link target's PageRank.[5] In addition, the Yahoo and Bing search engines also respect this attribute value.[6]

On June 15, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts announced on his blog that GoogleBot changed the way it treats nofollowed links, in order to prevent webmasters from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. Prior to this, webmasters would place nofollow tags on some of their links in order to maximize the PageRank of the other pages. As a result of this change, the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank of outgoing normal links as they started counting total links while calculating page rank. The new system divides page rank by total number of outgoing links irrespective of nofollow or follow links, but passes the page rank only through follow or normal links. Cutts explained that if a page has 5 normal links and 5 nofollow outgoing links, the page rank will be divided by 10 links and one share is passed by 5 normal links.[7] However, as of March 1 2020, Google is treating the nofollow link attribute as a hint, rather than a directive, for crawling and indexing purposes.[8]

Interpretation by the individual search engines

While all engines that use the nofollow value exclude links that use it from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of it vary from search engine to search engine.[9][10]

  • Google states that their engine "in general" takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link.[11]
  • Yahoo! follows it, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.[12]
  • Bing may not follow it, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.[13]
  • Ask.com also respects the attribute.[14]
  • Baidu appears to respect the attribute.[15][16][17]
rel="nofollow" Action GoogleYahoo!BingAsk.comBaidu
Uses the link for ranking No No No N/A No
Follows the link No Yes N/A No N/A
Indexes the "linked to" page No Yes No No N/A
Shows the existence of the link Only for a previously indexed page Yes Yes Yes N/A
In results pages for anchor text Only for a previously indexed page Yes Only for a previously indexed page Yes N/A

Use by weblog software

Many weblog software packages mark reader-submitted links this way[18] by default (often with no option to disable it, except for modification of the software's code).

More sophisticated server software could suppress the nofollow for links submitted by trusted users like those registered for a long time, on a whitelist, or with an acceptable karma level. Some server software adds rel="nofollow" to pages that have been recently edited but omits it from stable pages, under the theory that stable pages will have had offending links removed by human editors.

The widely used blogging platform WordPress versions 1.5 and above automatically assign the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc.).[19] However, there are several free plugins available that automatically remove the nofollow attribute value.[20]

Use on other websites

MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia, was equipped with nofollow support soon after the initial announcement in 2005. The option was enabled on most Wikipedias. One of the prominent exceptions was the English Wikipedia. Initially, after a discussion, it was decided not to use rel="nofollow" in articles and to use a URL blacklist instead. In this way, the English Wikipedia contributed to the scores of the pages it linked to, and expected editors to link to relevant pages.

In May 2006, a patch to MediaWiki software allowed enabling nofollow selectively in namespaces. This functionality was used on pages that are not considered to be part of the actual encyclopedia, such as discussion pages, user pages and resources for editors.[21] Following increasing spam problems and a within-Foundation request from co-founder Jimmy Wales, rel="nofollow" was added to article-space links in January 2007.[22][23] However, the various interwiki templates and shortcuts that link to other Wikimedia Foundation projects and many external wikis such as Wikia are not affected by this policy.

Other websites like Slashdot, with high user participation, add rel="nofollow" only for potentially misbehaving users. Potential spammers posing as users can be determined through various heuristics like age of registered account and other factors. Slashdot also uses the poster's karma as a determinant in attaching a nofollow tag to user-submitted links.

Social bookmarking and photo sharing websites that use the rel="nofollow" tag for their outgoing links include YouTube and Digg.com[24] (for most links); websites that don't use the rel="nofollow" tag include Yahoo! My Web 2.0, Technorati Favs, and Propeller.com (no longer an active website).[25]

Repurpose

Search engines have attempted to repurpose the nofollow attribute for something different. Google began suggesting the use of nofollow also as a machine-readable disclosure for paid links, so that these links do not get credit in search engines' results. Google considers paid backlinks a black-hat practice. When it comes to link building strategy, getting organic links is the right way of doing it. Paid links do not assure high authority links from sources relevant to your niche market or industry. Moreover, paid links are mostly considered as spam links which might be lost after a long period of time. Also, this kind of linking practice might not generate high traffic and also does not build brand identity.[26]

The growth of the link buying economy, where companies' entire business models are based on paid links that affect search engine rankings,[27] caused the debate about the use of nofollow on paid links to move into the center of attention of the search engines, who started to take active steps against link buyers and sellers. This triggered a very strong response from web masters.[28]

Control internal PageRank flow

Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website, but Google has since corrected this error, and any link with a nofollow attribute decreases the PageRank that the page can pass on. This practice is known as "PageRank sculpting". This is an entirely different use than originally intended. nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, some SEOs have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link should work just like nofollow used for external links.

Several SEOs have suggested that pages such as "About Us", "Terms of Service", "Contact Us", and "Privacy Policy" pages are not important enough to earn PageRank, and so should have nofollow on internal links pointing to them. Google employee Matt Cutts has provided indirect responses on the subject, but has never publicly endorsed this point of view.[29]

The practice is controversial and has been challenged by some SEO professionals, including Shari Thurow[30] and Adam Audette.[31] Site search proponents have pointed out that visitors do search for these types of pages, so using nofollow on internal links pointing to them may make it difficult or impossible for visitors to find these pages in site searches powered by major search engines.

Although proponents of use of nofollow on internal links have cited an inappropriate attribution to Matt Cutts[32] (see Matt's clarifying comment, rebutting the attributed statement)[33] as support for using the technique, Cutts himself never actually endorsed the idea. Several Google employees (including Matt Cutts) have urged Webmasters not to focus on manipulating internal PageRank. Google employee Adam Lasnik[34] has advised webmasters that there are better ways (e.g. click hierarchy) than nofollow to "sculpt a bit of PageRank", but that it is available and "we're not going to frown upon it".

YouTube, a Google company, uses nofollow on a number of internal "help" and "share" links.[35]

Criticism

Use of nofollow where comments or other user content is posted (such as Wikipedia) not only depreciates the links of spammers but also of users that might be constructively contributing to a discussion and preventing such legitimate links from influencing the page ranking of the websites they target.[36]

Criticism of usage by Wikipedia

Employment of the nofollow attribute by Wikipedia on all external links has been criticized by web authors for not passing the deserved rank to referenced pages which serve as the original source of each Wikipedia article's content. The decision was enacted on Wikipedia to combat spamdexing on its pages, which are an otherwise tempting target for spammers as Wikipedia is a very high-ranking site on most search engines. The drawbacks for original publishers are that they must compete with the Wikipedia article for a higher rank in search results and that their website does not receive the increase in rank that otherwise would have been contributed without nofollow.[37][38]

On September 10, 2019, Google announced[39][40] two additional ways for webmasters to qualify the relationship of outbound hyperlinks. The attribute rel="sponsored" may be used to denote links that are advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements. The attribute rel="ugc", standing for "User-Generated Content", may be used to denote content such as user-contributed comments and forum posts. Additionally, the attributes may be combined, such as rel="ugc sponsored", denoting a link that was both user-generated and sponsored. In 2019, WordPress announced plans to convert all blog comments into rel="ugc".[41]

These "hint" link attributes address some of the criticisms of nofollow by allowing webmasters to denote outbound links that lack "the weight of a first-party endorsement", but are not necessarily spam.

See also

Blocking and excluding content from search engines

References
  1. The nofollow Attribute and SEO, archived from the original on 2011-07-15
  2. rel="nofollow" Specification, Microformats.org, retrieved June 17, 2007
  3. W3C Patent Policy 20040205,W3.ORG
  4. W3C (December 24, 1999), HTML 4.01 Specification, W3C.org, retrieved May 29, 2007
  5. Google (January 18, 2006), Preventing comment spam, Official Google Blog, retrieved on May 29, 2007
  6. Microsoft (June 3, 2008), Bing.com, "Bing Community", retrieved on June 11, 2009
  7. Cutts, Matt (2009), PageRank sculpting
  8. Google begins viewing nofollow links as a hint for crawling and indexing
  9. Loren Baker (April 29, 2007),How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute, Search Engine Journal, retrieved May 29, 2007
  10. Michael Duz (December 2, 2006), rel="nofollow" Google, Yahoo and MSN, SEO Blog, retrieved May 29, 2007 Archived June 2, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  11. "Use rel="nofollow" for specific links - Search Console Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2018-01-15.
  12. "How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute - Search Engine Journal". searchenginejournal.com. 29 April 2007.
  13. "Dofollow And Nofollow Links In SEO". Beta Compression. Retrieved 2017-03-18.
  14. "Webmasters". About Ask.com. Archived from the original on 2012-07-07. Retrieved 2012-01-09.CS1 maint: unfit url (link)
  15. "NoFollow_ Baidu Encyclopedia". Baidu. Retrieved 2016-01-20.
  16. "Nofollow now works for Baidu". SEO Shifu. Retrieved 2016-01-20.
  17. "Baidu FAQs". BaiduGuide. Retrieved 2016-01-20.
  18. Google Blog (January 18, 2005), Preventing comment spam, The Official Google Blog, retrieved September 28, 2010
  19. Codex Documentation, Nofollow, Wordpress.org Documentation, retrieved May 29, 2007
  20. WordPress Plugins, Plugins tagged as Nofollow, WordPress Extensions, retrieved March 10, 2008
  21. Wikipedia (May 29, 2006), Wikipedia Signpost/2006-05-29/Technology report, Wikipedia.org, retrieved May 29, 2007
  22. Brion Vibber (January 20, 2007), Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now, Wikimedia List WikiEN-l, retrieved May 29, 2007
  23. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-22/Nofollow
  24. John Quinn (September 2, 2009), Recent Changes to NOFOLLOW on External Links, Digg the Blog, retrieved on September 3, 2009
  25. Loren Baker (November 15, 2007), Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don’t Use NoFollow Bookmarks and Search Engines, Search Engine Journal, retrieved on December 16, 2007
  26. "Buying Backlinks has 12 Disadvantages". www.ergoseo.com. Retrieved 2018-08-28.
  27. Philipp Lenssen (April 19, 2007), The Paid Links Economy, Google Blogoscoped, retrieved June 17, 2007
  28. Carsten Cumbrowski (May 14th, 2007), Matt Cutts on Paid Links Discussion - Q&A, SearchEngineJournal.com, retrieved June 17, 2007
  29. October 8, 2007, Eric Enge Interviews Google's Matt Cutts, Stone Temple Consulting, retrieved on January 20, 2008.
  30. March 6, 2008, You'd be wise to "nofollow" this dubious advice, Search Engine Land.
  31. June 3, 2008 8 Arguments Against Sculpting PageRank With Nofollow Archived 2008-08-08 at the Wayback Machine, Audette Media.
  32. August 29, 2007 Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories, Moz (marketing software).
  33. August 29, 2007 Moz, SEOmoz comment by Matt Cutts.
  34. February 20, 2008 Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google
  35. "Nofollow Reciprocity". Inverudio.com. 2010-01-28. Retrieved 2012-01-09.
  36. Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
  37. "''nofollow'' criticism at". Blogoscoped.com. 2007-01-25. Retrieved 2012-01-09.
  38. "''nofollow'' criticism at www.marketingpilgrim.com". Marketingpilgrim.com. 2007-01-23. Retrieved 2012-01-09.
  39. "Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links". Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
  40. "Qualify your outbound links to Google - Search Console Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2019-09-12.
  41. "WordPress 5.3 Adopts Rel UGC Nofollow Link Attribute". Search Engine Journal. 2019-10-04. Retrieved 2019-10-04.
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