No-Follow; Why, Where and When

You want the search engine spiders to follow links on the web to your site and crawl it so you can get indexed. Sometimes spiders can get confused, however, so you need to steer them away from things that can be misconstrued.

The no-follow attribute is a bit of code added to a hyperlink. It blocks the spiders from following the link, as well as keeping any PageRank from being transferred.

Links are an important part of Google’s algorithm. Unfortunately, black hat webmasters will do anything they can think of to obtain links. Google fights back with a variety of penalties. The worst of these are reserved for website owners who actually buy links from sites with high PageRank in order to artificially boost their own.

Google describes link buying as ‘evil’ and heavily penalizes sites that buy PageRank in the form of a link from another more successful site on the web. This results in some sites being kicked off of the front page of the SERPs and the webmasters are shocked! Sometimes they don’t know the SEO they hired is using these tactics – which is one more reason you should use care when picking and SEO firm.

Of course, there is another reason for buying links that has nothing to do with PageRank. Links on a popular site get clicked on due to the high amount of traffic. If you place a link on a high traffic site it works just like an ad. Paying for links to advertise isn’t evil – just manipulating PageRank is.

Add the no-follow attribute to these link to block any PageRank from transferring to your site. The spiders won’t crawl it; and since you aren’t benefiting from PageRank, Google ignores the link. This removes you from the penalty box and keeps you looking good!