Have you implemented the
“nofollow” HTML tag on your SEO Web site design yet? If your answer is no, then don’t go scurrying off add it, since it looks
like Google has put an end to nofollow’s usefulness in SEO Web site design. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll explain what nofollow is.
Nofollow is a tricky HTML SEO Web site design attribute to describe. According to Wikipedia, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.”
That’s kind of jargony. So here’s a definition in plain English: nofollow is a SEO Web site design tag that tells search engines to not “count” a certain outbound link. There are several ways that Google decides how Webpages are ranked, and one of the most important is by the number of links that a Website is getting. A Website that’s getting many links coming to it means that Website has more authority. Say you wanted to link to a Website, but you didn’t want to contribute to its authority. The nofollow tag means that Google won’t count your link when it compiles that Website’s authority.
That’s the first SEO Web site design principle that’s important to understand. The second is that Webpages with authority have more link power. And when that Webpage links to others, it portions out its link power evenly to those other sites. Say you have a nice, authoritative home page that links to every other page on your Website, just as a proper home page should. But why should you give that valuable link power to rarely-visited pages, like the Terms of Service page? Or the FAQ page? Wouldn’t it be better if you could somehow channel that link power to pages you actually want people to find in search engines?
Until recently, you could do just that with the nofollow SEO Web site design tag. When you placed the nofollow tag before the links to your FAQ or ToS pages, you would be sacrificing those page’s potential for authority (since Google wouldn’t count those links from your homepage), while boosting the link power sent to your other, more crucial pages.
But things have changed. According to Matt Cutts, Google’s in house SEO guy, nofollow doesn’t allow Webmasters to portion out link power to preferred pages anymore. So what can Webmasters do? First, they should remove all nofollow tags, since they’re basically of no value. Then, they should concentrate on the best methods of creating a Website that gets great search rankings: ethical link building, fresh content and lots of relevant pages.
