A brief history of "No-Follow"

byDavidOlsen

2.8K followers

13 years ago

I responded to a Forum post earlier today about Google's "No-Follow" tag. Since I know that not everyone used the forum, I thought I'd add my response to my blog a well.

The Question was - Should I Care about using "No-Follow" on my posts?

This was my response:

The do-follow, no-follow thing is really a non-issue. Here's why...

Every web page that is indexed in Google has some page rank. When Google spiders your page, it counts up all the hyperlinks (both internal and external) and divides that by the amount of Page rank it has, each of those hyperlinks is passed that fraction of page rank. So if you have a page that is a page rank of 1 with 10 links on it, then each of those links get one tenth of that page rank. If that same page only has two links, then half of that page rank is passed to each page.

When it was introduced four or five years ago "no-follow" allowed site owners to link out to other pages but to not pass any page rank to them. Additionally, Google would NOT count those no-follow links when it was dividing up the page rank. This allowed site owners to "sculpt" their page rank - they could link out to any page they wanted but by using the "no-follow" tag they could keep all of their page rank withing their site. Thus boosting their own page rank.

"No-Follow" still does NOT pass any page rank to the hyperlinked page. However, Google didn't like the idea that so many web masters were exploiting the No-follow tag to keep all of their own page rank, so they redefined how No-Follow worked. Today, regardless as to whether you use No-Follow or not, all links are counted when the page rank is divided so it no longer benefits the site owner to use the no-follow.