What Is The Nofollow Attribute?

Date First Published: 11th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what the nofollow attribute is in this article.

The nofollow attribute is a HTML attribute used to instruct search engine bots to ignore the URL and not follow it. If a website links to an external site using a nofollow outbound link, it will cause the linked site to not gain any authority, pass on any link juice, or provide any SEO benefits for it. Adding the nofollow attribute to a link is referred to as 'nofollowing' the link. An example of a nofollow link can be seen below.

Note:

The only difference between a dofollow and a nofollow link is that a nofollow link has that extra tag above.

Why Are Nofollow Links Used?

Nofollow links are often used for the following reasons:

• Sponsored links and paid content.
• Links that a website does not want to support.
• User-generated links on forums and comments to prevent posted links from being used to artificially boost the ranking of external sites.

Note:

Search engines often like a good balance of both dofollow and nofollow backlinks. Nofollowing all the links of a website will do more bad than good.

Note:

If you notice that someone has linked to your website and they have used the rel="nofollow" attribute on their website, you can always ask them to remove it, especially if there is no obvious reason to add it.

Links on high-ranking and major sites, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Quora, and Reddit all use the rel="nofollow" attribute, so if you linked to your website on these websites, it would not provide any SEO benefits or boost your search engine ranking. A Google Chrome extension called 'Strike Out Nofollow Links' automatically puts a line through any nofollow links on a page so that you don't have to have to keep manually checking the HTML.

What Are Dofollow Links?

Dofollow links are the default type of links that add value to the site that they are linked to, causing the linked site to gain authority and improve the search engine ranking. These do not require any additional HTML code and search engines interpret these backlinks as an organic relationship between the two sites. There is no such thing as the rel="dofollow" attribute. All standard links are, by default, dofollow.

Why Was The Nofollow Attribute Created?

Originally, the nofollow attribute was created by Google in 2005 as a way of preventing comment spam. As the popularity of blogs grew, comment spam also did. Spammers used to leave links to their websites to artificially boost the ranking of their pages, causing spammy sites to rank high in Google and pushing high-quality sites out. Blog comment spam got out of control because this technique worked so well, so Google introduced this attribute in 2005. Other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo have adopted the nofollow attribute.

Is It Okay To Use The Nofollow Attribute On Internal Links?

Internal links can be nofollowed with the rel="nofollow" attribute to instruct search engine bots to not crawl the internal link. It is often used when the website owner does not want a specific page to be crawled, but nofollowing internal links is not recommended. The nofollow attribute is not designed for internal links. Instead, pages should be blocked from being indexed by other methods, such as using robots.txt or adding the noindex tag to the header of the HTML page.

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