Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

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.

They did this 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.

We are ethical South African search engine optimization practitioners based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Internet marketing efforts in South Africa are still in their infancy. Search engine marketing and search engine positioning is built around 3 basic concepts - organic search engine optimization, optimizing for PPC (pay per click) campaigns and site functionality. All three areas must work together to succeed.