The "nofollow" attribute

The "nofollow" attribute

When you create a link in any webpage you create it to offer the user a chance to visit something related to what they are reading. In the good old days all links (from other websites) got counted as backlinks by the  search engines but in 2005 Google introduced the nofollow attribute to reduce the amount of link spamming that was taking place on the internet.

The “nofollow” attribute is added to links to tell a search engine do not count this link as a backlink to the site. The idea behind it is that if people are not going to get anything by posting their link, they will not post it unless it is related.

How do you use the “nofollow” attribute?

Assume you want to make a backlink for a website. For this example I will do a backlink for my website http://www.top-rated-books.com/ which is labelled “Top Rated Books”.

A regular link looks as follows:

Links with the “nofollow” attribute look as follows:

For the user the two links are identical however hubpages does not allow the post of links with the "nofollow" attrubute for me to show you that.

To find if a site posts links with the “nofollow” attribute in Firefox you simply need to Right click on the webpage and click view source. If next to the link the website has a “nofollow” attribute then that is not a valid backlink, if there is nothing there (or there is a “dofollow” attribute) it is a valid backlink.

The “dofollow” attribute

The “dofollow” attribute got introduced alongside the “nofollow” attribute and what it does is the exact opposite of the “nofollow” attribute. Links with the “dofollow” attribute are valid backlinks, it basically tells google and the other search engines to count the link as a backlink.

Some webmasters claim that the “dofollow” attribute contributes more than a regular link. Unfortunately since Google do not share their algorithm we have no way of verifying this claim.

Related hubs:

Hubpages and SEO part 1

Backlink exchange