No Follow Tags are Read By Google Spiders
So what are No Follow Tags well the wiki reference is thus:
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. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.
Lots of big words in there that a lay person who perhaps does not have much experience writing web sites will have a lot of problems with for example HTML Hyper Text Markup Language nothing complicated about it it simple refers to the way text and other code which is simply gobbledygook text is laid out on a web page and read by a browser. The web browser is able to interpret the commands and display the page accordingly for example the picture to the right here will have a <span> </span> attribute added to it to allow it to be displayed to the right of the text. You dont get to see the tags as they are hidden in the page, the fact the are surrounded by < > tells the browser not to display them and to interpret the command inside the tag.
The main think in the wiki explanation we are going to concentrate on today is ‘link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index’ What exactly does that mean.
Well if you were minded to make a comment to this post below you would have the opportunity to add your own web site within the comments section. Now that could be a blog or a commercial site or even your favourite such as BBC news or other if you were so to choose. When the goggle spiders then crawl over this page they will see that link and count it as a vote towards that particular site, the more votes accrued then the further up the Search Engine Rankings Pages that site will appear for its chosen keywords. This particular blog has disabled the no follow tag which therefore allow the votes to be counted for those sites displayed in making a comment.
That is probably the easiest way for me to be able to describe it in non SEO terms. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which basically means creating and working your web pages to such an extent that you give them the best possible chance to appear high in the rankings for a particular term.
Clearly our business here is in the accommodation sector in Blackpool and this blog appears within the domain name of our establishments web space (you can see that by looking at the Url bar. It should come as no suprise that the following text after the / is one of the keyword phrases that we target for our own web site. Although here it is displayed as bedandbreakfastblackpool this is not ideal as clearly this does not make much sense but the most lucrative terms (and these are the most searched terms in the industry sector outside of the word hotel) would be bed and breakfast blackpool or a combination of those words and b&b blackpool or a combination again . It is always the most lucrative terms that get snapped up first by those looking to purchase domain names. That means whomever owns www.bed-and-breakfast-blackpool or www.bedandbreakfastblackpool are going to feature quite highly in searches for people looking for accommodation in Blackpool.
Try it yourself. Open up a google page and enter Bed and Breakfast Blackpool this blog is not optimized for the term so will not appear on probably the first 3 or 4 pages, but if you were to use a long tailed keyword phrase such as Bed and Breakfast Blackpool SEO No Follow Tags then I am pretty sure this article is going to be in the first 10 results. Now if there were 20 blogs written around Blackpool with all those terms within them then google has a dilemma! How does it choose which one to put at the top and which one to put at the bottom. Clearly commercial advantage lies with the page that gets itself to the top of the list.
Google uses an alogirithm to work out the placements the formula for such is a very closely guarded secret. But some things are known about it. One of the marks it gives is the number of inbound links a site has. So if for example you were to comment on this article and include your page url within the comments box then it would give you one google vote. Taking that on into its simplest terms if you then tagetted some phase such as blue widgets in Blackpool and were one of two sites that competed on that term google would put your site above the other on inbound links.
So next time you are minded to comment or not on that blog post and whether you should enter your url then you should know you will get a little benefit from it.
In summary Sites that follow the do follow principle (such as this one) will allod google to follow all the links on the page. That means the follow will not only be counted as a vote but will also benefit from additional useful kudos if the subject material on the linked site is in common. Page rank of the site also comes into play here but that subject is for another day.
Sites that have the no follow attribute enabled will not allow google to follow the links but these will still be counted as a vote for that partucular site.
One downside is the amount of spam that can be picked up by persons trying to gain advantage by posting numerous links in the hope of accelerating their site(s) up the SERPS. Although it is a simple enough job to moderate these out.
Just don’t forget to ‘nofollow’ your ancillary pages (login, register etc) – all the pages you don’t want a search engine to index. A useful tactic if you’re in to PR sculpting.
And in case you haven’t started to look at robots.txt yet, have a gander… It can complement nofollow in directing how search engines index your site.
Cheers NQH thanks for the heads up. This is pretty techie stuff that I have only started acquainting myself in the last couple of Months via online forums such as Digital Point and of course the massive amount of info that is out there.
Clearly what we are talking about here would go over most peoples heads so that leads me to assume (particularly with your knowledge on how to climb the serps) you work in this area? Or if not you have a very keen interest within it?
My interest is pretty much all self taught. Before we came to Blackpool I headed up the Trade Union on a major distributuion site operated by Safeways (the fact Ken Morrison bought them out led to my redundancy and our arrival in Blackpool)anyway as such that gave me access to some pretty intensive TUC and own TU courses a number of which were about web design and how to use to organize in the TU sector. No serious academic qualifications as such except in totally unrelated niche’s such as H&S and Road Haulage but there you are.
If you do decide to go it alone and host in your own space give me a shout as I have accumulated some pretty cool WP themes that normally you would have to shell out for.
these are great tips, you also should take a look at the robots.txt, it can also be a great tool to keep the spiders from reaching unimportant parts of your site.
Hey i want dofollow attribute for selected comments.What you think should i updated it from datbase manually.Is it possible?Do you have any plugin for this purpose?If so please sendme a link.Any way thanks for such informative post.