The nofollow html tag is only known to a select few in the industry. Ask the random small business owner about it and they will look puzzled. Next, ask friends and family who don’t run any web sites, but still use the ‘net on a daily basis. Then, ask someone in the SEO field if they know about the nofollow tag and how it effects search engine ranking

I’m willing to bet that the only person to know about the nofollow is involved in SEO.

This is a fundamental flaw with the use of the nofollow. If you want to use it, you need to make the effort to code it into the HTML. Once you’ve done that, you might as well alert the engines that you not only aware of optimization, but you’re willing to go out of your way to protect your site.

OK links are needed so now what?
Yeah, I get that. Anyone involved in SEO should realize that links are an important component to the equation. Now what?

What I find interesting and yet mind blowing is that everyone in seo knows about it. Using a nofollow alerts the engines to the fact that you are trying to keep your tail covered.

Nofollows Raise Curiosity

If you and I were having a long conversation, and I kept referring to something I had tucked away in a brown paper bag that I’m carrying, you’d be interested — right? Of course! You’d even want to see what’s inside the bag too I bet, especially if I opened it up right under your nose.

Being nice, I’d let you see what was inside the bag — and then immediately require you to forget how or why you ever saw it.

That entire situation would be nothing but nonsense. There is no way you could ever forget how or where you came across whatever it was that was inside that bag. You wouldn’t let yourself forget it — and you know you’d always remember me when you thought back to what was in there.

This is what a nofollow is like for the engines. Links are intended to be contextual. Why then do we limit our ability to reason and just assume that the engines see a nofollow and forget all references between two linked pieces of content?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.