Once the most important part of Google’s ranking system, but now one of hundreds of search engine algorithms, PageRank is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO) past and present history. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm applied by Google.com that assigns a number or rank to each hyperlinked web page within the World Wide Web. The basic purpose of PageRank is to list web pages from the most important to the least important, reflecting on a search engine results page when a keyword search occurs. The basic process involves PageRank evaluating all of the links to a particular web page. If a web page has a lot of links from large websites that also rank well, then the original web page is given a high ranking. Where the links are coming from is just as important as the number of links to any particular web page, the system being rather “democratic” according to Google.com.
To overcome reduced the rank we should use meta tab rel = "nofollow".
The rel=nofollow isn’t a real meta tag but more of a html description. It is often used on blogs, forums and guestbooks. But it is also possible to use it in your website if you don’t want certain links (intern or extern) to be followed and as a result leak pagerank. By adding the rel=nofollow you let the spiders know that you didn’t add the link yourself but it was placed due to a blog or forum and therefore not necessarily approved. This doesn’t mean that spiders will reject the link. It just indicates that the link has no connection with your own website. Your website won’t be harmed in case there is a link to your website with a rel=nofollow.
The nofollow tag was introduced by Google in 2005 to help combat the use of spammy links for SEO purposes. This tag can be used in the rel attribute of any HTML <a> element. Setting this tag for a link instructs search engines that this link should not affect the link target’s search engine rankings. A nofollow link should give no link juice to the website that the link is pointing to (though we don’t know exactly what Google is actually doing behind the scenes of course).
You can set the nofollow attribute in hyperlinks as follows:
<a href=www.example.com rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>
To check if a website is using the nofollow tag on your link, you can have a look at the page source and search for “nofollow” in the source code.
Let’s look at five ways the nofollow tag can be useful for your website.
Use nofollow For Links to Unimportant Pages.
You can use nofollow on links to your privacy policy, terms & conditions page, and any other pages on your website that you don’t want to rank in search engines.
Use For Duplicate Links.
If you have multiple links on one of your website’s pages pointing to the same URL (to an internal page or an external site), you might want to use the rel=”nofollow” tag on the less important links. There is some controversy around this topic in the SEO community however, with some experts claiming that if you use the nofollow tag for one of the links, the other links will also get ignored by Google. Experimentation as always is key here.
Use in Blog Comments.
If you have a blog that allows people to post comments, it could be a good idea to automatically set the nofollow tag for every link that is included in a comment. The most famous blogging CMS WordPress’ default setting for comments is to set the nofollow tag on any links.
Use to “Vouch” for Your Website
According to some SEO experts it’s is a good idea to get some nofollow backlinks to your website. They believe that this shows to Google that you are naturally building links to your website, and not just buying links or using spammy link building techniques.
Getting a nofollow link from a website or forum that has high authority and/or a large audience in your niche will still help your website get more visitors.
Use When Linking To Dodgy Websites.
Sometimes you want to link to a low-quality or spammy website. For example for referencing a dodgy website in a case study that you are writing about bad SEO practices. You certainly don’t want to give such sites any link juice from your website though. Furthermore, linking to spammy websites might even hurt your own website’s reputation and search engine ranking. Using the nofollow tag in this case makes sure that Google’s bots ignore the link.
If you’re currently not using the nofollow tag on your website, you might want to go through the list above and do a quick check of your website and tweak out your links a bit.
Zane Schwarzlose runs the SEO at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin-based web marketing firm. He recently learned to stop worrying and love the nofollow.
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