There is currently a lot of hype about the HTML function of nofollow lately, so I thought I would take this opportunity to revisit the idea of nofollow and when to and when not to use it.

If you are new to the idea of nofollow, I have provided a brief definition from its Wikipedia article, which elaborates its purpose:

“Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.”

An example of how to use nofollow in HTML has been provided below:

Webmasters can benefit from using the nofollow attribute when exercising the following steps.

  • Linking to a secure page or website that asks for sensitive information.
  • Linking to a Feedburner (or other) RSS feed.
  • Linking to internal pages that you do not want to count towards PageRank.

WebProNews (a sister site to MySEOBlog) recently interviewed Matt Cutts, who is an engineer at the search giant Google, where Cutts discussed the latest happenings regarding nofollow. This interview can be seen here.

Do you use nofollow in your content? If so, please feel free to leave your experience with nofollow in this post’s comment, and how it has helped improve your presence in the SERPs, or how it has affected your content overall.