A brief history of "No-Follow"
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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.
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Recent Comments
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Thank you for this post, as like clouiter said, I also now finally understand the 'follow' - 'no follow' concept .
I think I understand "Follow" & "No Follow" Now thanks to you:)
But I'm still unsure of what "index" & "no index" means and how it would affect seo?
Thanks for blogging about this,
I'm sure a lot of people who don't check the forums will appreciate this.
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Thanks for that. I'd no idea what the reason for the "No Follow" was. However, i'm still a bit lost on what you mean by passing the rank to a link. Does this mean then that your page rank is also determined by the amount of links TO that page elsewhere on the net?
Why does it still exist if Google have done away with it influencing this?
Cheers
Kev
Hey Kevin
Nofollow is a HTML attribute that instructs search engines not to follow a link. Our pages are ranked on good original content with great choices of keywords. And yes may be backlinks play a role in the ranking.
Wishing you well and a terrific day.