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nofollow

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Attribute on a link for search engines
For technical documentation about nofollow as it relates to Wikimedia projects, see meta:nofollow.
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Nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

Concept and specification

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The nofollow value was originally suggested to stop comment spam in blogs. Believing that comment spam affected the entire blogging community, in early 2005 Google's Matt Cutts and Blogger's Jason Shellen proposed the value to address the problem.[1] [2]

The specification for nofollow is copyrighted 2005–07 by the authors and subject to a royalty-free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy 20040205,[3] and IETF RFC 3667 and 3668.[2]

Example

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HTML:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Link content</a>

Introduction and support

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Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel="nofollow"[4] would not influence the link target's PageRank.[5] In addition, the Yahoo and Bing search engines also respect this attribute value.[6]

On June 15, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts announced on his blog that GoogleBot changed the way it treats nofollowed links, in order to prevent webmasters from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. Prior to this, webmasters would place nofollow tags on some of their links in order to maximize the PageRank of the other pages. As a result of this change, the usage of nofollow leads to the evaporation of the pagerank of outgoing normal links as they started counting total links while calculating page rank. The new system divides page rank by the total number of outgoing links irrespective of nofollow or follow links, but passes the page rank only through follow or normal links. Cutts explained that if a page has 5 normal links and 5 nofollow outgoing links, the page rank will be divided by 10 links and one share is passed by 5 normal links.[7] However, as of March 1 2020, Google is treating the nofollow link attribute as a hint, rather than a directive, for crawling and indexing purposes.[8]

Interpretation by the individual search engines

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While all engines that use the nofollow value exclude links that use it from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of it vary from search engine to search engine.[9] [10]

  • Google states that their engine "in general" takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link.[11]
  • Yahoo! follows it, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.[12]
  • Bing may not follow it, but they exclude it from their ranking calculation.[citation needed ][13]
  • Ask.com also respects the attribute.[14]
rel="nofollow" Action GoogleYahoo!BingAsk.com
Uses the link for ranking No No No N/a
Follows the link No Yes N/a No
Indexes the "linked to" page No Yes No No
Shows the existence of the link Only for a previously indexed page Yes Yes Yes
In results pages for anchor text Only for a previously indexed page Yes Only for a previously indexed page Yes

Use by websites

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Many weblog software packages mark reader-submitted links this way[15] by default (often with no option to disable it, except for modification of the software's code).

More sophisticated server software could suppress the nofollow for links submitted by trusted users like those registered for a long time, on a whitelist, or with an acceptable karma level. Some server software adds rel="nofollow" to pages that have been recently edited but omits it from stable pages, under the theory that stable pages will have had offending links removed by human editors.

The widely used blogging platform WordPress versions 1.5 and above automatically assign the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc.).[16] However, there are several free plugins available that automatically remove the nofollow attribute value.[17]

Social bookmarking and photo sharing websites that use the rel="nofollow" tag for their outgoing links include YouTube and Digg.com [18] (for most links); websites that don't use the rel="nofollow" tag include Yahoo! My Web 2.0, Technorati Favs, and Propeller.com (no longer an active website).[19]

Repurpose

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Control internal PageRank flow

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Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website, but Google has since corrected this error, and any link with a nofollow attribute decreases the PageRank that the page can pass on. This practice is known as "PageRank sculpting". This differs from the attribute's original intended purpose. nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, some search engine optimization practitioners have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link should work just like nofollow used for external links.

Several SEOs have suggested that pages such as "About Us", "Terms of Service", "Contact Us", and "Privacy Policy" pages are not important enough to earn PageRank, and so should have nofollow on internal links pointing to them. Google employee Matt Cutts has provided indirect responses on the subject, but has never publicly endorsed this point of view.[20]

The practice is controversial and has been challenged by some SEO professionals, including Shari Thurow[21] and Adam Audette.[22] Site search proponents have pointed out that visitors do search for these types of pages, so using nofollow on internal links pointing to them may make it difficult or impossible for visitors to find these pages in site searches powered by major search engines.

Although proponents of use of nofollow on internal links have cited an inappropriate attribution to Matt Cutts (see Matt's clarifying comment, rebutting the attributed statement) as support for using the technique, Cutts himself never actually endorsed the idea. Several Google employees (including Matt Cutts) have urged Webmasters not to focus on manipulating internal PageRank. Google employee Adam Lasnik [23] has advised webmasters that there are better ways (e.g. click hierarchy) than nofollow to "sculpt a bit of PageRank", but that it is available and "we're not going to frown upon it".

YouTube, a Google company, uses nofollow on a number of internal "help" and "share" links.[24]

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On September 10, 2019, Google announced[25] [26] two additional ways for webmasters to qualify the relationship of outbound hyperlinks. The attribute rel="sponsored" may be used to denote links that are advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements. The attribute rel="ugc", standing for "User-generated content", may be used to denote content such as user-contributed comments and forum posts. Additionally, the attributes may be combined, such as rel="ugc sponsored", denoting a link that was both user-generated and sponsored. In 2019, WordPress announced plans to convert all blog comments into rel="ugc".[27]

These "hint" link attributes address some of the criticisms of nofollow by allowing webmasters to denote outbound links that lack "the weight of a first-party endorsement", but are not necessarily spam.

See also

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Blocking and excluding content from search engines

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References

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  1. ↑ The nofollow Attribute and SEO, archived from the original on 2011年07月15日
  2. 1 2 "rel="nofollow"". Microformats Wiki. 10 Jan 2005. Retrieved June 17, 2007.
  3. ↑ "W3C Patent Policy". W3C. 2004年02月05日.
  4. ↑ "Links in HTML documents". W3C. rel = link-types. Retrieved May 29, 2007.
  5. ↑ "Preventing comment spam". Official Google Blog. 2005年01月18日. Retrieved May 29, 2007.
  6. ↑ "robots exclusion protocol: joining together to provide better documentation". Bing Community. June 3, 2008. Archived from the original on 2009年06月11日. Retrieved June 11, 2009.
  7. ↑ "PageRank sculpting". Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO. 2009年06月16日.
  8. ↑ Nguyen, George (2020年02月28日). "Google's new treatment of nofollow links has arrived". Search Engine Land.
  9. ↑ Baker, Loren (April 29, 2007). "How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute". Search Engine Journal. Archived from the original on 2007年04月28日. Retrieved May 29, 2007.
  10. ↑ Duz, Michael (December 2, 2006). "rel="nofollow" Google, Yahoo and MSN". SEO Blog. Archived from the original on June 2, 2007. Retrieved May 29, 2007.
  11. ↑ "Use rel="nofollow" for specific links - Search Console Help". support.google.com. Archived from the original on 2017年10月04日. Retrieved 2018年01月15日.
  12. ↑ "How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute - Search Engine Journal". searchenginejournal.com. 29 April 2007.
  13. ↑ "Dofollow And Nofollow Links In SEO". Beta Compression. Retrieved 2017年03月18日.
  14. ↑ "Webmasters". About Ask.com. {{cite web}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  15. ↑ "Preventing comment spam". Official Google Blog. 2005年01月18日. Retrieved September 28, 2010.
  16. ↑ "Nofollow". WordPress Codex. 2005年05月23日. Retrieved May 29, 2007.
  17. ↑ "Plugins categorized as nofollow". WordPress.org. Retrieved March 10, 2008.
  18. ↑ Quinn, John (September 2, 2009). "Recent Changes to NOFOLLOW on External Links". Digg the Blog. Archived from the original on 2009年09月06日. Retrieved September 3, 2009.
  19. ↑ Baker, Loren (November 15, 2007). "Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don't Use NoFollow Bookmarks and Search Engines". Search Engine Journal. Archived from the original on 2007年11月16日. Retrieved December 16, 2007.
  20. ↑ "Eric Enge Interviews Google's Matt Cutts | Perficient Digital". Perficient Digital. 2007年10月08日. Archived from the original on 2019年10月01日. Retrieved 2025年06月11日.
  21. ↑ Thurow, Shari (2008年03月06日). "You'd Be Wise To "NoFollow" This Dubious SEO Advice". Search Engine Land. Retrieved 2025年06月11日.
  22. ↑ "8 Arguments Against Sculpting PageRankTM with Nofollow | AudetteMedia". www.audettemedia.com. Archived from the original on 2011年10月06日. Retrieved 2025年06月11日.
  23. ↑ Odden, Lee (2008年02月20日). "Video: Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google". TopRank® Marketing. Retrieved 2025年06月11日.
  24. ↑ "Nofollow Reciprocity". Inverudio.com. 2010年01月28日. Retrieved 2012年01月09日.
  25. ↑ "Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links". Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Retrieved 2019年09月12日.
  26. ↑ "Qualify your outbound links to Google - Search Console Help". support.google.com. Archived from the original on 2019年09月12日. Retrieved 2019年09月12日.
  27. ↑ "WordPress 5.3 Adopts Rel UGC Nofollow Link Attribute". Search Engine Journal. 2019年10月04日. Retrieved 2019年10月04日.

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