Nofollow vs. No Follow
Posted: March 21st, 2009
When it comes to link building and PageRank (PR), whether a link is nofollowed or not (a.k.a. dofollowed) can be a pivotal issue. Many link builders generally base their link building efforts on the quality of links pointing to them, rather than quantity. This then implicitly lead to the use of PageRank as a measure of a website’s quality, and the potential value of a link coming from it.
With all the hype surrounding PR, webmasters began paying more attention to their outbound links as the link attribute rel=”nofollow” was conceived, to help webmasters indicate that an outbound link from their site did not necessarily have their seal of approval.
The rel=”nofollow” is indeed quite useful for handling links that visitors would post themselves (i.e., through commenting systems). The attribute is also a practical way of conveying to search engines that you do not want any “link juice” to flow from an important content page to less important ones, such as “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages.
Nofollow vs. No Follow
The standard syntax for implementing the attribute is the following:
<a href=”http://domain.com/contact.html” rel=”nofollow”>Contact Us</a>
But as to err is human, every now and again someone will intend to nofollow a link, but accidentally leave a space between the words “no” and “follow” such that it becomes:
<a href=”http://domain.com/contact.html” rel=”no follow”>Contact Us</a>
The code directly above is technically incorrect.
Does It Matter?
More importantly though, will search engines understand and react the same to both versions? This question was posed to Googlers Matt Cutts and John Mueller, and according to them, the two versions are not treated similarly, “even if they look similar at first glance.”
Matt does hint that this may change in the future, though.
Tags: code, link building, PageRank, SEOYou can bet that we’ll run a test and consider adding support for it. We often add support for when webmasters appear to mess up their meta tags or robots.txt, but we think the intent is pretty clear. The idea is to help webmasters achieve their goals, not be nitpicky about syntax.
Fascinating, didn’t know the difference between “nofollow” and “no follow”…. hence why the code typo will end up meaning “dofollow” because “nofollow” won’t be recognized. Thanks.
interesting indeed, a slight change in the code is like night and day. Im curious now
Mine is now a do-follow blog. Will that affect how google looks at my site?
-http://newsblog1st.blogspot.com
Although I’d like to comment on the dofollow blog, but I just do it whether it’s dofollow or nofollow. I thought even my comment on the nofollow blogs will get readers. Even though they may not help with page rank, but more readers is a good thing, isn’t it?
Well good to know difference between NoFollow and No follow. :D) Especially glad to know that “No follow” is interpreted as do follow. So cool.
Good eye for details !!!
Thanks to share this good tip.
Wow I learn a lot from your post. Thank you for sharing.
Ok, that clear it out. What about when we use “no-follow”