Okay, so the debate here is - Is the use of the attribute "rel=nofollow" good for the links or not.
Some of us might argue that its good while others may disagree. So what is this "Nofollow"?
Let me cite an example to explain this better.
Say, I have a blog for old books called oldbooksforsale.blogspot.com. If somebody wants to place his link in my bloog (assume, his link is http://www.oldbookstore.com) then what would blogspot or any other standard blog do is to add a nofollow to the url.
This is how it will look before the attribute is added.
< a href="http://www.oldbookstore.com” rel=”whats that” > link to my book store </a>
After the attribute is added it will look like this –
< a href="http://www.oldbookstore.com” rel=”nofollow” > link to my book store </a>
Or
< a rel="nofollow” href=http://www.oldbookstore.com” >link to my book store</a>
The order is unimportant.
What happens now? Well, it simply means that the link is not accepted by the website owner. In simple terms it means to say that “Hey! Somebody else posted this link, not me!”
So, how is this going to help? For one thing, those who posted the link are intent on promoting their website; perhaps also increase the PR for the website as well.
Did I hear “spam”? Yes, you can say it’s a way of spamming.
Its an advantage though to have your links in another website. Your link serves as a “vote” when search engines like Google picks up the link. It helps boost your page rank in Googlespeak terms.
Just as you would get a “vote”, chances of getting indexed on search engines are also higher.
So to make web blogs (as in this instance of the article) less lucrative (read attractive) for spamming purposes – it’s a good deal to have such codes embedded in your links.
Thus in short, blog owners, forum operators, guest columns on various sites can all get spammed with malicious links or spam messages.
What Google will do is –
It won’t follow through to that page.
To make the link popular, a count is needed. Google won’t advocate that as well.
It won’t count in the anchor text as well for ranking purposes.
By doing this, it simply does not mean that Google would “kill” that link or decrease its popularity. What it would do is not to have the links counted as a “good link” or “vote”. Google would simply ignore it.
If some forum/blog owner would place a link then, that does not mean that they won’t be in contention for linking. Definitely, they would be indexed and even ranked.
In fact, if you would do a search on MSN, Yahoo, Google or any other highly rated search engines; you would find that there are plenty of sites which can be easily considered in the spammers list.
Google is already a contender to have the “nofollow” attribute implemented in its code. Sooner or later, there would be a support to have this implemented in the code by default.
The problem that one could face would be – when they exchange links. If the nofollow attribute is added to the link, then the very purpose of having the link exchange is defeated. The links won’t be followed and won’t obviously gain popularity.
Another advantage is that you can actually (perhaps?) increase the popularity of certain sites. Let us say you have 45 links on your home page, you don’t place the “nofollow” link on
