What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?

June 15th, 2008 � No Comments

No Follow!

What is a no follow tag?

A no follow tag, or “nofollow” (if you want to be one of those hip new-speak people with “nospaces” between words), is a tag that websites and blogs sometimes add to stop search engine “spiders” or “bots” from following some of their links to external sites.

For example, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, they will often include a link to their homepage with their comment. If you have a “no follow” tag, then search engines like Google will ignore this link.

A “no follow” tag has two effects:

1. It stops spammers from leaving comments on your blog or wiki. Spammers will use any opportunity they have to propagate links to their sites - to fool search engines into thinking that their spam page is very popular thus increasing its visibility on search engine results. A “no follow” tag stops this sort of behaviour, because it removes the incentive for spammers to leave comments on your site.

2. It means your website does not “leak” links. This is a search engine optimisation (SEO) concept. Every time you link to a site, you are effectively “voting” for it, and your “vote” increases its popularity in search engine rankings. Every additional link on a page dilutes the “voting power” of all the other links on that page. This is especially important because internal links in a website (links to your own pages) also count. By diluting your page’s votes, you are diluting your ability to make your own pages popular or those of genuine websites you like.

I noticed that your site is a “NoFollow free” site. What does that mean?
Although “no follow” is a great deterrent for spammers, it also stops genuine users who want to comment on your blog or site, but also want the credit to seep through and back to their own site.

I think it is fair to allow contributors to enjoy the reputational vote, and therefore I have removed all “no follow” tags from ThatDanny’s comment areas. I feel that the benefit outweighs the risk. This does however mean I’ll have to be more ruthless with comments that are solely self-serving, or contain too many links.

If you have a Wordpress blog, you can do the same, and install the NoFollow Free Plugin on your site. It automatically removes no follow tags, and gives you several option on how to control them.

UPDATE ON 24 July 08: Noble as the nofollow initiative was, I found the number of spammers wanting to use it simply as a link-exchange was becoming too much of a time commitment - and this grew the more popular my blog became. I still think new blogs should use it when they start up to encourage comments and engagement, but at a later stage you may find you have to pull the plug. I did.

SEO articles in this series:

How do I get my site into Google? - SEO Article #1
How to Write for Google - SEO Article #2
How do I get my site into Microsoft Live Search? - SEO Article #3
What’s a “NO FOLLOW” tag?

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