The nofollow concept was originally introduced by the major search engines as an attempt to reduce the amount of spam that was littering blog comments and other public areas with links to disreputable or irrelevant sites. It is considerably easier than any of the old methods such as redirecting the link to a URL blocked in robots.txt. The nofollow link, rel=”nofollow”, is a way for webmasters to indicate to the search engines not to follow specific links and give them link juice. Spammers are unable to benefit from their abuse and webmasters won’t need to worry about it.

Google suggests using the nofollow tag for other reasons besides protecting comment areas in blogs. For one, you can use them in order to prevent paid links from influencing search results or negatively affecting users. Another valuable use for html nofollow is for crawl prioritization. For example, you can tell Googlebot to avoid crawling pages that require signing in or registering, and to focus on more desirable pages.

Please note that the various search engines handle meta nofollow their own way and have their own recommendations, so it’s a good idea to become familiar with them by reading their webmaster help sections.

The use of the nofollow link attribute for PageRank sculpting was popular for links that have no ranking value or potential – until it was debunked by Google in 2009. The pages affected included those that are expected to be on most websites — terms and conditions, privacy policies, contact information, maps, etc. but have no influence. Used generally on larger websites, the Google nofollow attribute for PageRank sculpting was applied to distribute more link power to other pages.

To learn more about how to use nofollow to keep links in check and improve your page rank, give Web.com Search Agency a call at 1-877-RANK321.