Nofollow: Keeping control of your Page Rank

Last week I wrote ‘dofollow: sharing some link juice‘ regarding why I changed the links within my comment sections to ‘dofollow’. As a follow up to that article I wanted to write about the ‘nofollow’ tag and when I use it and why…

Nofollow

Firstly you can read Google’s blog on Preventing Comment Spam (2005) to understand why the Nofollow tag was first used – (but as a side note, since I implemented it last week I’ve not had one piece of spam posted )

How the ‘nofollow‘ tag or ‘attribute‘ is being implemented changes from search engine to search engine. Some search engines actually take it literally and don;t follow the link at all, whilst others still ‘follow‘ the link to find new web pages but just to index the content there.

What does nofollow actually mean?

The code rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine to not put a score on the link rather than don’t follow this link. (NOTE: Just to confuse things, this is different to the nofollow used within the robots meta tag that DOES tell a search engine not follow any of the links within the body content of the document.)

The following image show which search engine does what with the ‘nofollow‘ tag:

When I use and don’t use the nofollow tag

Basically I follow a simple rule:

For external Links

If there’s a site that I like and want to pass on some ‘link juice’ to and feel it could benefit from having some extra PR (page rank) then I won’t use it.

If there’s a site that I like but it’s already ranking highly (e.g. wikipedia articles) then they really won’t benefit that much from having additional ‘link juice’ – and I’d rather pass on some PR to a site or sites that could benefit (e.g. EACH’s Treehouse Appeal to raise £3 million to build and equip a new purpose-built children’s hospice or tepilo.com where you can sell/buy your property online for free)

For Internal Links

If I want to pass on some ‘link juice‘ to a page within my site – because I want to get it to rank higher then I won’t use the nofollow tag.

Other than that, my internal links are set to ‘nofollow‘, that includes the following areas in my side panels:

• Recent Comments (not to be confused with the links to the people that have commented – see ‘dofollow: sharing some link juice‘ for clarification)
• Latest Tweets
• Communicate FM – Latest

However, links to my iPhone App and contained in My Blogroll are ‘dofollow‘

How do you change the nofollow setting in WordPress?

This is dead easy:

1. Click on ‘Appearance’ then ‘Widgets’ and expand any of the ones you have listed in your ‘Side Panel’ and look for the following (normall down at the bottom) :

2. Click on the drop down menu – default is set to ‘leave as is’ and select which option you want:

• Leave as is
• Dofollow
• Nofollow

That’s it!…simples

If you want to change a link within the body copy of your article you need to change your editing view from the ‘Visual’ to ‘HTML’ tabs, which are on the right hand side of your wordpress editor:

Then look for the link that you want to change to nofollow:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/link-to-wherever.html”>

and add the following code in red:

<a href=”http://lee.smallwood.ws/2010/05/11/link-to-wherever” rel=”nofollow”>

You’re done

…And finally

I’m not saying that you should adopt a similar stance when it comes to selecting which links to set to ‘dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’ but I’m just hoping that this post helps you understand the differences and what the effect is.

Blatent Plug – if you liked this post then you can link back – and pass on some ‘link juice’ to it using the following:

<a href=”http://lee.smallwood.ws/2010/05/18/nofollow-keeping-control-of-your-page-rank/”>Nofollow: Keeping control of your Page Rank</a>

Or if you don’t want to pass on some ‘link juice’ use the following:

<a href=”http://lee.smallwood.ws/2010/05/18/nofollow-keeping-control-of-your-page-rank/” rel=”nofollow”>Nofollow: Keeping control of your Page Rank</a>

And/or ‘Share it’ by using the icons below…

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Tagged as: nofollow, page rank, PR