The nofollow attribute has brought a lot of confusion in the seo world. This post will clear this up.

What is nofollow?

According to Google the “Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

A nofollow meta tag which goes on a link tells the search engine spider not to crawl that page. This means they do not crawl the linked page and index it, meaning it does not raise its position within the search engine result pages.

You can put a nofollow on individual links.

When do you use it?

1) when linking to an opponent or competitor’s web site, the tag stops the page rank flowing from your page to theirs.

2) A paid link – if someone is paying to have a link on your site they should not be getting pagerank from your site.

3) PageRank sculpting – when you want to control the pagerank flow within your page. For example, you may want to put a nofollow on links to pages that do not need to have as good search rankings, like the Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Contact Us pages.

What does it look like?

A normal link to the site
a href “http://www.examplesite.com>Example Site< /a>
Linking to the site with a nofollow tag
a href “http://www.examplesitecom” rel=”nofollow” >Example Site< /a>

I hope this has cleared up the nofollow link. Let me know if you have any further questions on this matter.