Follow - No Follow ?

[DeirdreJ]

Can someone please give me a brief understanding of this or a link to some good information on how this works? I want to make sure I am not missing something important with this.

Thank you!

[AlexNewell]

Years ago when the world was young...

Hehe it was not that long ago - it just seems like it. Blogger was taking off and people were leaving boatloads of spam comments just to get links back to their sites.

When Google bought Blogger they took exception to spam links and invented the no follow addition to the link.

The link still works fine with a no follow but it does not add to links counted for Google PageRank

For traffic it makes no difference at all - your visitors will follow and that is what you care about.

I could go on and on about this!

:-)

OK?

[David Jackson]

Can someone please give me a brief understanding of this or a link to some good information on how this works?

Deirdre, forums or blogs that are "no-follow" simply means you won't receive backlink credit for your posts or comments. "Follow" means you do receive backlink credit.

David Jackson

[DeirdreJ]

Thanks! I feel more 'in the know'! =)

[ChristineCobb]

Dan Thies talks about this in his free book SEO Fast Start. Here's the link http://www.seofaststart.com/

[Lynn Terry]

The name for that link attribute is a bit misleading. Search engines DO follow links that have the no-follow attribute. The no-follow simply means that the link won't pass PageRank from the site it's on, to the site it links to.

Keep in mind too that it is a Google attribute (PageRank is Google-relative) so that doesn't affect how other search engines treat the attribute.

There is A LOT of debate regarding no-follow, and whether Google does in fact pass PageRank, or whether they index pages/sites found by following links with the no-follow attribute, etc. I would do a google search and read up on it a bit. Interesting stuff.