{"id":7676,"date":"2005-01-19T09:41:17","date_gmt":"2005-01-19T16:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/01\/19\/hmmmm-what-does-nofollow-actually-do.html"},"modified":"2005-01-19T09:41:17","modified_gmt":"2005-01-19T16:41:17","slug":"hmmmm_what_does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/19\/hmmmm_what_does.html","title":{"rendered":"Hmmmm … what does nofollow<\/em> actually do?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s what Google says<\/a>: <\/p>\n

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites<\/strong> in our search results.<\/p>\n

Here’s what MSN Search says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Here’s what Yahoo says<\/a> … well, Yahoo doesn’t exactly say what their search bots will do with the link, just that it means that the link is not necessarily trusted by the site owner.<\/p>\n

The 6A announcement says<\/a> that the tag will :<\/p>\n

… alert [Google’s] search spider that a particular link shouldn’t be factored into their PageRank<\/strong> calculations.<\/p>\n

The MT nofollow plugin page<\/a> says:<\/p>\n

This initiative, with announced support from Google, Yahoo, MSN (and surely more to come), will direct search engines to ignore links with this attribute set for the purposes of spidering <\/strong>or increasing search engine relevance or ranking<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There’s two very different effects being described here. <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Search engines will not count links with the nofollow <\/em>tag in page ranks.\n
  2. Search engines will not spider through links with the nofollow <\/em>tag.<\/ol>\n

    All the sites agree on #1, but effect #2 is not explicitly mentioned by Google (or by the 6A announcement). To my mind, #1 is what we’re particularly combatting here; #2 is a somewhat less desirable effect, though nothing that’s going to break the web, by any means. It’s just interesting that there’s no clear-cut description of how the search engines are actually implementing this.<\/p>\n

    Oh, and about that “untrusted” thing — wouldn’t it be an interesting variation on the nofollow plugin to have it not take effect on a certain class of commenters, e.g., a whitelist or Typekey-authenticated, or something like that? That might alleviate some of the “doom, doom, doomity-doom” chanting I’m hearing over this issue.<\/p>\n

    \nUPDATE<\/u>: Jay Allen posts on it<\/a> (and says, “search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site”). But does he know? Or are different search engines treating it differently? As usual, though, his comments\/trackbacks are the most interesting bits there (nofollow or not).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Here’s what Google says: From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. Here’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-spam"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7681,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/18\/it_doesnt_work.html","url_meta":{"origin":7676,"position":0},"title":"IT DOESN’T WORK ANY MORE! DO YOU FINALLY GET IT!?","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 18-Jan-05 5:48pm","format":false,"excerpt":"(The above is a message to comment spammers.) Comment spammers do their evil and f\u0153tid thing in order garner high Google pageranks for their sites. MT long ago set up...","rel":"","context":"In "Spam"","block_context":{"text":"Spam","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/computer-security\/spam"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7678,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/19\/more_on_the_goo.html","url_meta":{"origin":7676,"position":1},"title":"More on the Google nofollow tag","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 19-Jan-05 7:53am","format":false,"excerpt":"A bit of a backlash this morning on the announcement of the new rel=\"nofollow\" tag that Google et al. are going to be implementing. Most of the critiques are referenced...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7672,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/19\/more_nofollow_t.html","url_meta":{"origin":7676,"position":2},"title":"More nofollow thoughts","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 19-Jan-05 2:28pm","format":false,"excerpt":"An extension of my post from this morning. As I read various objections to the nofollow tag, aside from the \"It won't actually instantly end all comment spamming\" (which nobody...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10734,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/07\/08\/master_of_my_own_domains.html","url_meta":{"origin":7676,"position":3},"title":"Master of my own domains!","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 8-Jul-07 10:31pm","format":false,"excerpt":"If I ever need to raise money quickly, all I need to do (apparently) is sell off some of my registered domains, according to these free appraisals at Leapfish.com Domain...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7668,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/20\/more_nofollow_m.html","url_meta":{"origin":7676,"position":4},"title":"More nofollow musings","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 20-Jan-05 6:50am","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the critiques re nofollow is that there are so many unprotected blogs out there. However, the development may not be all good news. Commenting on the announcement Jason...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11915,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/01\/02\/open_source_search.html","url_meta":{"origin":7676,"position":5},"title":"Open source search?","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 2-Jan-08 10:07am","format":false,"excerpt":"Search engines, from Google to Yahoo to Microsoft, keep their algorithms secret as to how they interpret the web of text and cross-links on the Internet into relevant results for...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}