Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your Nofollow shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the Nofollow offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of Nofollow at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a Nofollow? Wrong! If the Nofollow is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about Nofollow then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling Nofollow? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about Nofollow and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your Nofollow wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your Nofollow then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the Nofollow site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about Nofollow, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your Nofollow, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.
Concept and specification
The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005. rel="nofollow" Specification,
Microformats.org, retrieved June 17, 2007
The specification for nofollow is (C) 2005-2007 by the authors and subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy 20040205, W3C Patent Policy 20040205,
W3.ORG and IETF RFC3667 IETF RFC3667,
IETF.org & RFC3668. IETF RFC3668,
IETF.org The authors intend to submit this specification to a standards body with a liberal copyright/licensing policy such as the
GMPG,
IETF, and/or
W3C. rel="nofollow" Specification,
Microformats.org, retrieved June 17, 2007
What nofollow is not for
The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on page Meta_element#The_robots_attribute that are designed to specify on an individual page level, what search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page.
Introduction and support
Google announced in early
2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow" attributeW3C (December 24, 1999), HTML 4.01 Specification,
W3C.org, retrieved May 29, 2007 would not influence the link target's PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag.Google (January 18, 2006), Preventing comment spam,
Official Google Blog, retrieved on May 29, 2007
How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still "follow" the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a Robots.txt#Alternatives, which
does tells a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.".
Interpretation by the individual search engines
While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.Loren Baker (April 29, 2007), How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute,
Search Engine Journal, retrieved May 29, 2007Michael Duz (December 2, 2006), rel=”nofollow” Google, Yahoo and MSN,
SEO Blog, retrieved May 29, 2007
- Google takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by Search engine optimization show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).Michael Duz (December 2, 2006), rel=”nofollow” Google, Yahoo and MSN, SEO Blog, retrieved May 29, 2007 Links with NOFOLLOW are included in the back-links reporting data at Google's Webmaster Central. Rel Nofollow Test from August 2007
- Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
- MSN Search respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
- Ask.com does not use the attribute for anything.
{| class="wikitable"|-!rel="nofollow" Action!Google!Yahoo!!MSN Search!Ask.com|-!Follows the link|Yes|Yes|Not proven|Yes|-!Indexes the "linked to" page|No|Yes|No|Yes|-!Shows the existence of the link|Only for a previously indexed page|Yes|No|Yes|-!In SERPs for anchor text|Only for a previously indexed page|Yes|No|Yes|}
Usage by weblog software
Most weblog software marks reader-submitted links this way by default (with no option to disable it without code modification).A more sophisticated server software could spare the nofollow for links submitted by Trust metric like those registered for a long time, on a whitelist, or with a high karma (Slashdot). Some server software adds rel="nofollow" to pages that have been recently edited but omits it from stable pages, under the theory that stable pages will have had offending links removed by human editors.
The widely used blogging platform Wordpress version 1.5 and above automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc).Codex Documentation, Nofollow,
Wordpress.org Documentation, retrieved May 29, 2007
Usage on other websites
MediaWiki software, which powers Wikipedia, was equipped with nofollow support soon after initial announcement in 2005. The option was enabled on most international Wikipedias. One of the prominent exceptions was the English language one. Initially, after a discussion, it was decided not to use rel="nofollow" in articles and to use a URL blacklist instead. In this way, English Wikipedia contributed to the scores of the pages it linked to, and expected editors to link to relevant pages.
In May 2006, a patch to MediaWiki software allowed to enable nofollow selectively in namespaces. This functionality was used on pages that are not considered to be part of the actual encyclopedia, such as discussion pages and resources for editors.Wikipedia (May 29, 2006), Wikipedia Signpost/2006-05-29/Technology report,
Wikipedia.org, retrieved May 29, 2007Following increasing spam problems and a within-Foundation order from
Jimmy Wales, rel="nofollow" was added to article-space links in January 2007;Brion Vibber (January 20, 2007), Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now,
Wikimedia List WikiEN-l, retrieved May 29, 2007.Wikipedia (January 22, 2007), Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-22/Nofollow,
Wikipedia.org, retrieved May 29, 2007 However, the various interwiki templates and shortcuts that link to other
Wikimedia Foundation projects and many external wikis such as Wikia are not affected by this policy.
Other websites like Slashdot, with high user participation, use improvised nofollow implementations like adding rel="nofollow" only for potentially misbehaving users. Potential spammers posing as users can be determined through various heuristics like age of registered account and other factors. Slashdot also uses the poster's karma as a determinant in attaching a nofollow tag to user submitted links.
Repurpose for paid links
While the effectiveness of the nofollow attribute to prevent comment spam is in doubt and raises other issues instead,Jeremy Zawodny (May 30, 2006), Nofollow No Good?,
Jeremy Zawodny's Blog, retrieved June 17, 2007 search engines have moved ahead and attempted to repurpose the attribute for something different. Google began suggesting the use of nofollow also as a machine-readable disclosure for paid links, so that these links do not get credit in search engines results.Matt Cutts (September 1, 2005), Text links and PageRank,
Matt Cutts Blog, retrieved June 17, 2007
The growth of the link buying economy, where company's entire business model is based on paid links that affect search engine rankings,Philipp Lenssen (April 19, 2007), The Paid Links Economy,
Google Blogoscope, retrieved June 17, 2007 caused the debate about the use of nofollow in combination with paid links to move into the center of attention of the search engines, who started to take active steps against link buyers and sellers.Matt Cutts (April 14, 2007 ), How to report paid links,
Matt Cutts Blog, retrieved June 17, 2007 This triggered a very strong response by the web master community in return and also raised new questions that need to be answered.Carsten Cumbrowski (May 14th, 2007), Matt Cutts on Paid Links Discussion - Q&A,
SearchEngineJournal.com, retrieved June 17, 2007
Criticism
Some weblog authors object to the use of rel="nofollow", arguing, for example,Michael Hampton (May 23, 2005), Nofollow revisited,
HomelandStupidity.us, retrieved May 29, 2007Loren Baker (February 14, 2007), 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck,
Search Engine Journal, retrieved May 29, 2007 that
- Link spammers will continue to spam everyone to reach the sites that do not use rel="nofollow"
- Link spammers will continue to place links for clicking (by surfers), even if those links are ignored by search engines.
- Google is advocating the use of rel="nofollow" in order to reduce the effect of heavy inter-blog linking on page ranking.
See also
Blocking and excluding content from search engines
- Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt)
- Meta_element#The_robots_attribute
References
nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.
Concept and specification
The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005. rel="nofollow" Specification,
Microformats.org, retrieved June 17, 2007
The specification for nofollow is (C) 2005-2007 by the authors and subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy 20040205, W3C Patent Policy 20040205,
W3.ORG and IETF RFC3667 IETF RFC3667,
IETF.org & RFC3668. IETF RFC3668,
IETF.org The authors intend to submit this specification to a standards body with a liberal copyright/licensing policy such as the GMPG,
IETF, and/or
W3C. rel="nofollow" Specification,
Microformats.org, retrieved June 17, 2007
What nofollow is not for
The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index are the
Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on page Meta_element#The_robots_attribute that are designed to specify on an individual page level, what search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page.
Introduction and support
Google announced in early
2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow" attributeW3C (December 24, 1999), HTML 4.01 Specification,
W3C.org, retrieved May 29, 2007 would not influence the link target's
PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag.Google (January 18, 2006), Preventing comment spam,
Official Google Blog, retrieved on May 29, 2007
How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still "follow" the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a Robots.txt#Alternatives, which
does tells a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.".
Interpretation by the individual search engines
While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.Loren Baker (April 29, 2007), How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute,
Search Engine Journal, retrieved May 29, 2007Michael Duz (December 2, 2006), rel=”nofollow” Google, Yahoo and MSN,
SEO Blog, retrieved May 29, 2007
- Google takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by Search engine optimization show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).Michael Duz (December 2, 2006), rel=”nofollow” Google, Yahoo and MSN, SEO Blog, retrieved May 29, 2007 Links with NOFOLLOW are included in the back-links reporting data at Google's Webmaster Central. Rel Nofollow Test from August 2007
- Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
- MSN Search respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
- Ask.com does not use the attribute for anything.
{| class="wikitable"|-!rel="nofollow" Action!Google!Yahoo!!MSN Search!Ask.com|-!Follows the link|Yes|Yes|Not proven|Yes|-!Indexes the "linked to" page|No|Yes|No|Yes|-!Shows the existence of the link|Only for a previously indexed page|Yes|No|Yes|-!In SERPs for anchor text|Only for a previously indexed page|Yes|No|Yes|}
Usage by weblog software
Most weblog software marks reader-submitted links this way by default (with no option to disable it without code modification).A more sophisticated server software could spare the nofollow for links submitted by
Trust metric like those registered for a long time, on a whitelist, or with a high
karma (Slashdot). Some server software adds rel="nofollow" to pages that have been recently edited but omits it from stable pages, under the theory that stable pages will have had offending links removed by human editors.
The widely used blogging platform Wordpress version 1.5 and above automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc).Codex Documentation, Nofollow,
Wordpress.org Documentation, retrieved May 29, 2007
Usage on other websites
MediaWiki software, which powers
Wikipedia, was equipped with nofollow support soon after initial announcement in 2005. The option was enabled on most international Wikipedias. One of the prominent exceptions was the English language one. Initially, after a discussion, it was decided not to use rel="nofollow" in articles and to use a URL blacklist instead. In this way, English Wikipedia contributed to the scores of the pages it linked to, and expected editors to link to relevant pages.
In May 2006, a patch to MediaWiki software allowed to enable nofollow selectively in namespaces. This functionality was used on pages that are not considered to be part of the actual encyclopedia, such as discussion pages and resources for editors.Wikipedia (May 29, 2006), Wikipedia Signpost/2006-05-29/Technology report,
Wikipedia.org, retrieved May 29, 2007Following increasing spam problems and a within-Foundation order from
Jimmy Wales, rel="nofollow" was added to article-space links in January 2007;Brion Vibber (January 20, 2007), Nofollow back on URL links on en.wikipedia.org articles for now,
Wikimedia List WikiEN-l, retrieved May 29, 2007.Wikipedia (January 22, 2007), Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-22/Nofollow,
Wikipedia.org, retrieved May 29, 2007 However, the various interwiki templates and shortcuts that link to other
Wikimedia Foundation projects and many external wikis such as
Wikia are not affected by this policy.
Other websites like Slashdot, with high user participation, use improvised nofollow implementations like adding rel="nofollow" only for potentially misbehaving users. Potential spammers posing as users can be determined through various heuristics like age of registered account and other factors. Slashdot also uses the poster's karma as a determinant in attaching a nofollow tag to user submitted links.
Repurpose for paid links
While the effectiveness of the nofollow attribute to prevent comment spam is in doubt and raises other issues instead,Jeremy Zawodny (May 30, 2006), Nofollow No Good?,
Jeremy Zawodny's Blog, retrieved June 17, 2007 search engines have moved ahead and attempted to repurpose the attribute for something different. Google began suggesting the use of nofollow also as a machine-readable disclosure for paid links, so that these links do not get credit in search engines results.Matt Cutts (September 1, 2005), Text links and PageRank,
Matt Cutts Blog, retrieved June 17, 2007
The growth of the link buying economy, where company's entire business model is based on paid links that affect search engine rankings,Philipp Lenssen (April 19, 2007), The Paid Links Economy,
Google Blogoscope, retrieved June 17, 2007 caused the debate about the use of nofollow in combination with paid links to move into the center of attention of the search engines, who started to take active steps against link buyers and sellers.Matt Cutts (April 14, 2007 ), How to report paid links,
Matt Cutts Blog, retrieved June 17, 2007 This triggered a very strong response by the web master community in return and also raised new questions that need to be answered.Carsten Cumbrowski (May 14th, 2007), Matt Cutts on Paid Links Discussion - Q&A,
SearchEngineJournal.com, retrieved June 17, 2007
Criticism
Some weblog authors object to the use of rel="nofollow", arguing, for example,Michael Hampton (May 23, 2005), Nofollow revisited,
HomelandStupidity.us, retrieved May 29, 2007Loren Baker (February 14, 2007), 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck,
Search Engine Journal, retrieved May 29, 2007 that
- Link spammers will continue to spam everyone to reach the sites that do not use rel="nofollow"
- Link spammers will continue to place links for clicking (by surfers), even if those links are ignored by search engines.
- Google is advocating the use of rel="nofollow" in order to reduce the effect of heavy inter-blog linking on page ranking.
See also
Blocking and excluding content from search engines
References
