A nofollow attribute within the code of your website tells search engines not to follow certain links. This way you indicate that you have links on your website, which you don’t want your website to be associated with. Is this a safe way to have contextual intercourse? In this article I will try to explain the nofollow tag and I will show better condoms for safe linklove.

The Nofollow tag
The nofollow tag can either be placed within your robots metatag or within the linktag itself.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
 
or
 
<a href=”http://www.vdgraaf.info/” mce_href=”http://www.vdgraaf.info/”  rel=”nofollow”>linktext</a>

All mayor search engines understand your command not to follow te link, but do they follow it? It’s just a directive they all agreed on, but following the link can tell much about your website and may indicate that you’re using any illegal tactics. So in my believes search engines will follow the link! Watch out who you link to, even if you’re using nofollow.

Linkpoints
Any link from one page to another conveys linklove or linkpoints to that page. Will a nofollow tag influence this?
Yes, in most search engines the recieving end of a nofollow link recieves no or little linklove. But the sending end is losing linklove that could otherwise be given to other links on that page.

The number of links on a page influences the amount of linklove that is given to each link. If one of those links is a nofollow most search engines still devide the linklove total between all links. There are certain ways to prevent losing linklove and even prevent search engines from seeing the link. Here’s an example.

Span links 
The <span> tag is used for inline grouping of HTML elements (just like a <div> is used for blocktype grouping). With a stylesheet you can indicate what it should look like, and you could make it behave like a normal link:

The solution

<span id=”link” style=”cursor: hand;cursor: pointer;text-decoration: underline;color: blue;” onclick=”location.href=’http://www.vdgraaf.info’” onmouseover=”document.getElementById(‘link’).style.color=’#FF00FF’;” onmouseout=”document.getElementById(‘link’).style.color=’blue’;”>linktext</span>

linktext

(an even better example is placed in the comment) 

This way you make links that aren’t even an <a> so absolutely none of the search engines sees it as a link. Use separate stylesheet and javascript files to keep the code clean, so you only need the empty span and an onclick url opener.

Use span links for links you want no search engine to follow. This way you won’t be associated with the linked site and you keep all linkpoints!

Don’t trust a faulty nofollow condom, but use a sturdy unfollowable link. Look for an even better example below!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 3:36 am and is filed under Links, Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.