Andy Coates Blog

Over the past few weeks I have had several emails asking me to check a blog to see if the comments have had the "nofollow" attribute removed or also know to be on the D-list. If your not sure what a nofollow or dofollow is, here is a quick rundown. When the Googlebot trawls your site it takes note of which links are going where, internally and externally. When you have a basic link which looks like this in html:

<a href="http://www.sitename.com">Anchor Text </a>

…the Googlebot will follow it and assuming that you have linked to this site from yours Google will take this link into consideration when calculating page rank. In essence when you link to another site you are voting, or vouching for this site saying, "hey people, have a look here for some good info".

Alternatively if your link contains a nofollow atribute it would look like this:

<a href="http://www.sitename.com"  rel="nofollow"> Anchor Text </a>

….the Googlebot will ignore this link as it has the "nofollow" attribute, because it has a nofollow Google understands that you don't vouch for this site. For example if you are linking to a social bookmarking site like Digg you may want to add the nofollow attribute to your Digg button as the page will have no real content just a record of who has Dugg your post.

Why Nofollow then?

Also when calculating page rank Google uses an algorithm to calculate which sites get awarded pagerank depending on where these sites have been linked from, the page rank for the page which is linking and the amount of outgoing links on the page linking. So roughly speaking if your site gets a link off another page of pagerank-5 but is is only one of 100 links on the page the amount of pagerank juice passed will be divided between these 100 links.

Alternatively if you get linked from a page with a pagerank of 2 and there are only a couple pf links on the page including your, your site will be awarded a much higher percentage of link juice compared to the previous. It is all relative so it is far better to get linked off a page with a few links than a page with many.

When using the nofollow as mentioned above Google ignores these links which in turn passes more link juice through the links with no "nofollow" attribute! So for example if you had a page with 10 links on, 7 were pointing to amazon.com and the rest were internal links to your site and a site you liked it would be recommended to "nofollow" the amazon links so that more link juice was fed to your internal links and to the link to the site you vouched for. This is it in very basic terms and the whole subject could have an entire blog to itself with many differentiating opinions on it.

When to use nofollow

Use nofollow when you don't vouch for the site in question but still wish to link to it. ie commercial sites such as amazon ebay etc.

Social bookmarking sites, see Andy bards plugin Antisocial

For an easy way to add nofollow attribute sin your Wordpress posts please check out this post Nofollow Hack, I'd recomed installing the dofollow hack (found at the bottom of the page) over the nofollow one as it defaults to dofollow as you will be sung that more than nofollow in your posts. Do not do what I did and accedently nofollow all of your interal links in your post as you will be robbing yourself of link juice!

How to check for nofollow on sites

There are several plugins and hacks which will highlight if a nofollow is being used but this is how to do it manually. Open the page you want to check and find the link which you want to check to see if it is being followed and take a note of the name try it on this page with the antisocial link above. In Firefox, on the page right click and click on the option view page source. In Internet Explorer, go to the page menu (top right in the latest version, and click on the view source option. This will bring up the code for this page in a text editor, generally notepad or another page in Firefox. Here you will be able to see all of the "guts" of the page and will be able to tell id a link is being followed or not, are you following me? lol. On the "View Source" page which you have just opened, hold down controll (ctrl) and hit "F" this will one a search box which will enable you to type in a word to search the code. Type in antisocial and it should take you to this line.

Social bookmarking sites, see Andy bards plugin <a href="http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/wordpress-plugin-antisocial.html" mce_href="http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/wordpress-plugin-antisocial.html" rel="dofollow">Antisocial</a>

Here you can see the code and the "rel" tag with dofollow after it, this means that I do vouch for this site and it will receive a little link juice on the next PR update. Not that I currently have any page rank to give, but what goes around comes around so in the future it will all count. Note: if there is no tag at all it also means you do vouch for the link.

You can do the same search looking for the dofollow or nofollow attributes on comments too by searching the source code for links already in the comments and seeing if it has a nofollow or dofollow after the link code.

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!