Nofollow is a leaky condom
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.
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
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!
December 31st, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have any negative association with their outbound links with rel=”nofollow”.
Do you have an idee on this matter?
December 31st, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Of course it does. If you start spamming a wikipedia article with casino links it starts dropping from high rankings. Good moderated articles just don’t have many super spammy links for more then a few hours.
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:10 am
I’ve been send a good unobtrusive script to make decent coded span links. Here it is:
<span title=”http://www.vdgraaf.info” class=”fakelink”>”not a link but still looks like one”</span>
“not a link but still looks like one”
It uses two extra classes in your stylesheet
.fakelink
{
color: #06c;
text-decoration: none;
cursor: pointer;
}
.fakelink-hover
{
color: #147;
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: pointer;
}
And the following javascript:
window.onload = relNoFollow;
function relNoFollow(){
var FakeLinks = document.getElementsByTagName(’span’);
if( FakeLinks.length > 0 ){
for( var i = 0; i < FakeLinks.length; i++ ){
if( FakeLinks[i].title.indexOf( 'http://' ) != -1 ){
FakeLinks[i].onmouseout = fakelinkMouseOut;
FakeLinks[i].onmouseover = fakelinkMouseOver;
FakeLinks[i].onclick = fakelinkClick;
}
}
}
}
function fakelinkMouseOver(){
this.className = 'fakelink-hover';
}
function fakelinkMouseOut(){
this.className = 'fakelink';
}
function fakelinkClick(){
var FakeLinkWindow = window.open( this.title, 'target', '' );
}
Thank you Robert for this code: http://dicabrio.com/javascript/nofollow-attribute.php
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Now that’s a nice script. I’ll link to it in my nofollow rant.
February 16th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
That’s the first time I’m seeing this javascript. Very original and thanks .. I’ll probably use it when I get the time to set up. Currently still using the basic Nofollow for some outlinks.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Some of you might understand it better in Dutch:
[…] Leaky link condom: nofollow doet niet wat het zegt, dus pas op waarvoor je het gebruikt. Goed artikel van Peter. […]
http://www.chapter42.com/2007/04/13/10-redenen-om-geen-nofollow-te-gebruiken.html
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Ha Peter, je weet hier duidelijk meer van… ;-)
zou je hier eens willen kijken?
http://marketingreview.web-log.nl/marketing_review/2007/07/you_comment_i_f.html
of hier:
http://nodirecton.blogspot.com/2007/07/you-comment-i-follow.html
Groet, Jos
March 31st, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Hi Peter, goed artikel. Ik schrijf een samenvatting over de nofollow tags. Die samenvatting baseer ik ook deels op jouw artikel. Als je het leuk vindt, houdt m’n site maar in de gaten!