First – what is rel=”nofollow” and how does it work?
Google first invented rel=”nofollow” in 2005 as an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link targets ranking in the search engine’s index.
Plain and Simple – it’s used to help the linking from website, preserve it’s value and offer not link influence to the website it’s linking to…
What rel=”nofollow” looks like in HTML
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.denverseo.me”>Denver SEO Company</a>
How much of an effect does rel = nofollow really have?
It all depends on the competitiveness of the keywords your targeting… Let’s take my personal website and blog for an example; Sean Hakes.com… I am working vigorously to compete for the keyword Denver SEO… There really isn’t much search volume for it; it’s more or so for fun and a game I decided to enter several months ago.
Several days ago I was ranking pretty steady on the 1st page until I wrote an article about Home Improvement Contractor marketing… I included two hyperlinks to websites in which I would typically include a rel=”nofollow,” this time I didn’t and Google took what little link authority my website had and diluted it which in returned caused me to drop several positions in Google for Denver SEO.
That’s it for now folks, a lesson learned – always remember to add rel nofollow if your linking to websites that you don’t wish to claim trust for in the search engine result pages…
Ouch.
Sean Hakes
04/02/2010 at 4:41 am Permalink
I think Google is altering the way it controls nofollowed links although Google themselves created it. I know that recently Matt Cuts stated that you can no longer sculpt pagerank using the nofollow tag. If an internal link has a nofollow tag, the pagerank will be lost and not distributed to the other inner links.