Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable has made a post on a WebmasterWorld thread, the thread is about a site losing its ranking in Google because they used NoFollow attribute for linking some of their internal pages. The site has used NoFollow attribute for their privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement and so on.

The NoFollow is a link attribute value used to instruct the search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The NoFollow link attribute was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to spamming in blog comments.

Reply by a WebmasterWorld member :

Well placing rel=”nofollow” on existing links on a site would impact several things.Only part of which is strictly PR related, depending on how Google looks at things the related link text should be made moot, the page that is doing the link just had an update done to it, and the page linked to should have also lost an IBL. So could this affect ranking etc? Yup.

Barry Schwartz explanation on how Google treats NoFollow:

Google will not crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute on it. Adam Lasnik of Google specifically said that. But of course, Google will crawl the same URL if it is linked to elsewhere, without the nofollow attribute.

So, if Google won’t crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute associated. And if these pages are not linked to from other sources (typically a privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement, terms of service type of page), then they won’t do well in the search results. Plus, those pages (the ones that are linked to using the nofollow tag) will not benefit your other pages on the site.

Aravindhan

Tags : SEO, Search Engine Ranking, NoFollow

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine. 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.