The use of the NOFOLLOW attribute on HREF elements is widespread and is often applied to blogs and other web resources that have largely user generated content. This makes sense as it discourages blog comment spamming and highly devalues the link. The nofollow attribute was introduced in 2005 and is now widely supported.

Use of the NOFOLLOW attribute on your own web site

Many people have used the NOFOLLOW attribute on their own sites to prevent passing link weight internally to pages that do not need to rank, for example a contact us page or privacy page.

<a href=”contact.php” rel=”NOFOLLOW“>Contact</a>

This can also be applied globally to a page by using the following code which means no links on the entry page are followed by Google.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow“>

Whilst this technique has been widely employed my personal opinion has always been “If you can’t vouch for the content on your own site, what does that say about the quality of your site?”.

After seeing several examples of high ranking sites employing this technique and reading what Google and Matt Cutts had to say I thought I would revisit the situation.

Matt Cutts wrote an article on Page Rank Sculpting that explicitly states that NOFOLLOW links do not pass Page Rank (PR) or any link weight to the page that is being linked to.

“Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.” – Matt Cutts, Google Engineer, on Page Rank Sculpting.

What this means is that you can use the NOFOLLOW attribute on your own site to prevent links passing PR to unwanted pages and therefore retaining more PR for the pages that you do want to rank. Google’s SEO Guidelines also discuss the correct use of the NOFOLLOW attribute however they stop short of discussing the use of it to pages on your own site.

There have been lots of controversial forum posts and articles on NOFOLLOW for PR Sculpting but after much deliberation I feel that today, it is an acceptable technique to use.

NB: The use of the NOFOLLOW attribute does not prevent a page from being indexed, it merely prevents any link weight from being passed through the link.

Useful Resources

• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/- Page Rank Sculpting by Matt Cutts
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf – Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide