How No Follow Links Can Affect Your Blogs

You might have heard of “No Follow Links” that affect many blogs through the comment section.  What exactly is meant by nofollow is not that known to many, and some get it confused with “noindex”.

“No Follow Links” is a way for site and blog owners to tell search engines “Do not follow this link” or “Do not follow the links on this page”.  This attribute appeared originally in the meta tag at page level, instructing search engines not to follow any of the outgoing links on the page.

Ways To Add No Follow Links Attributes

There are always two ways to add the nofollow attribute to a page’s links.  This can be globally done with meta tags to make all the links inside a page not followed by bots or it can be locally done by adding “nofollow” attribute to specific links only.

It’s a good thing if Google indexes a blog’s URL even from its comment section.  In order to avoid showing comments on the Google results, the owner needs to use meta robots tag with “noindex” attribute as:

Such meta tag would tell search engines that such page should not be indexed, which must not be included on search results.  The “nofollow” attribute is what most blog authors use, which is also known as “link condom”.  No follow links script looks more like this:

Using “nofollow” will cause Google to drop the target links from its overall web graph.  However, target pages might still appear in Google’s index if other sites would link to them without “nofollow”, or if such URLs are submitted in a Sitemap with Google.  What’s interesting and important for you to know is that other search engines take “nofollow” in slightly varied ways.

When To Use No Follow Links

You can use “nofollow” attribute in three significant situations in order for your site to be Google compliant.  If you are not sure about the content quality of the site that you might be linking to, or when someone had to pay for the link like a company that advertises on your blog, or when the page that is at the end of the link can’t be crawled, such as a link for login which leads to a page that is password protected.

It is a puzzle to many why those who have blogs want to use “nofollow” on the links in the comment section.  This is due to the fact that links to one’s site affects its PageRanking and no one really knows too much about the quality of the sites posted in comments.  To avoid having spammed links or bad neighbors, it is important for these blog owners to use “nofollow” for links.

You can consider using nofollow if you are confronted with some cases.  If you do not want or could not vouch for the untrusted content of pages that you link from your site, such as untrusted guestbook entries or user comments, you need to use nofollow for those links.  Doing this helps disallow spammers from picking your site as an easy target to keep it save from passing the rank of bad neighborhoods across the web.