What Does rel=nofollow Mean to You?

In this article I may describe things in a little more of a technical fashion than I ordinarily do, but there are several different reasons for this.  First, is will show you an example of some of the more technical things you should be keeping up on when trying to give yourself or your clients top search engine placement.  Second, it will show you how many people often miss out, or miss the boat, as it were.  Lastly, it has a few more practical implications as to how you need to be building your own site and how you should be searching out links from other websites.

Now, not too long ago, Matt Cutts, the head Webspam engineer for Google, posted about the nofollow attribute tag.  He posts about it occasionally, as it is an often debated topic.  Basically, when you add this nofollow tag (rel="nofollow") to a link it will essentially tell the search engines that while you are providing that link, you are not vouching or endorsing the page it is linking to.  What does this mean to you?  Well, every page that gets indexed in teh search engines receives a different amount of "voting power".  Think of this as being on a scale from between ten and one hundred.  This vote is similar in its use and understanding to Google's page rank of one to ten.  To put it simply, every link on a page will pass a small piece of that page's voting power on.  So, if you had a page that had a page rank of 1, that'd be ten points of voting power.  If you had five links on that page, then each one of that pages would be given 2 points, or 0.2 pagerank.

Now, when it was first thought up, the nofollow tag was often used to stop so much of a page's pagerank from leaking out to too many other sites and pages, and instead be focused where a webmaster wanted it to be.  So, if you had 5 links and put nofollow tags into about 3 of them, then the 2 remaining links would get all 5 points of your voting power instead of just 2.  Unfortunately, this was abused far too much by webmasters to scult their pagerank, and so Google changed the way they handled the tag.  Now, nofollowed links still won't get counted, but the power that would've gone to them isn't being redistributed anymore.  So to use my previous example again, based on Google's most up to date algorithm, the 2 pages being linked to without the nofollow tag will still get only 2 points, the other 3 links will get absolutely zero points, and then there'll be 6 points floating around being uncast, as it were.

So what are the implications of all of this? Well...

The first is that placing nofollow tags on your own site can help to deter spammers, but in addition to that, sadly, it will also reduce your own total voting power.  My opinion is that actively participating in trackback and spam approval and disapproving content that really is spam, while at the same time letting your vote to other sites be counted with dofollow, would be a better overall strategy.

Secondly, getting links from blogs and other places that get the nofollow tag added to them won't be helping you to increase web traffic from the search engines to your website. Why, just the other day I read a blog post from another search engine optimizer, and he suggested that followed links that were dofollow were preferred, but not essential.  These kinds of links can still bring you some traffic from the people who click on it, however.

Well, hopefully this article has helped you, and will continue to help you to decide what communities you should be participating in as far as link building goes.  It will also hopefully help you to build your own communities to help grow your voice and maximize the influence you have on the web.