The rel=”nofollow” Attribute
By Benj Arriola - Posted on Mon Jul 3, 2006Search engines crawl the web. You can submit sites to be included in search engines but even if you don’t, if your site is linked from other websites, most probably you will get added even without submitting your website. Search engines have programs that follow the links of websites from one website to another and they call these scripts robots, spiders or crawlers. Sometimes the robots are simply refered to as bots. And whatever a search engine runs over it will be considered to be added into the large database of indexed websites.
Although some parts of a website can be excluded by setting up rules in your robots.txt file, which I will explain in another article, but robots.txt can only exclude pages within your website. But for pages going away from your site, you can use the rel=”nofollow” attribute of your link tags.
<a rel="nofollow" xhref="http://www.wherever.com/path/file.html">
Link Text
</a>
But please note that not all search engines will follow this rule, although Google strickly follows the rule. If ever for some reason you want to disallow bots to continue crawling. It may sound like a selfish act no avoid other sites from getting crawled by spiders, but it is a good way to prevent crawling of websites that resort to spamming guestbooks and blog comments.
3 Responses to “The rel=”nofollow” Attribute”
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November 3rd, 2006 at 5:21 am
[...] Even before Isulong SEOph, I was pretty much aware of the nofollow attribute in anchor tags. And during the Isulong SEOph SEO contest, which was my first SEO contest, we have seen a lot of comment spam that got the attention of SEOBook author Aaron Wall and popular V7N contest competitor Jim Westergren. I have also blogged about the nofollow attribute before. [...]
November 4th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
[...] If you don’t submit, but you have websites linked to you. You will still somehow get crawled when the bots (also called robots, spiders, crawlers) go over your site. These bots are nothing but programs of the search engines that go from one site to another tracing every link. Unless there is a nofollow attribute, (but i really don’t think so, I believe it is still crawled, but not given the ranking credit for having a link. This is my personal opinion only.) [...]
November 16th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
[...] A search engine friendly directory are those with links without the nofollow attribute or does not use any type of redicting script for its links. [...]