The No Follow tag and search engines
Helping your Page Rank
If a determined spammer wanted to he could access hundreds, thousands even of
blogs every day. He could make a comment like nice site Joes corner store". Of
course in each comment would be a link back to Joes corner store. This way a
massive back link structure could be created that had zero benefit to the search
engines or search community.
Google and all the other major search engines overcame this problem by
discounting blog comments to zero. In other words commenting was of course still
allowed but the comments would be totally disregarded by the search engines in
terms of back link counting.
Link spamming was curtailed by introducing what is known as the nofollow tag attribute.
This tag identified to a search spider that any link with such a tag inside it
should be ignored. Heres how the above link would look with the nofollow tag
incorporated
<a rel = "no follow" href="http://www.practical-water-gardens.com/">Focus
supply the world's best water features</a>
This tag introduction, probably unknowingly, provided webmasters and SEOers
with a way to engineer PageRank by employing this tag within their own websites. |