Why should you use the rel="nofollow" tag ?
The rel=nofollow isn’t a real meta tag but more of a html description. It is often used on blogs, forums and guestbooks. But it is also possible to use it in your website if you don’t want certain links (intern or extern) to be followed and as a result leak pagerank. By adding the rel=nofollow you let the spidersknow that you didn’t add the link yourself but it was placed due to a blog or forum and therefore not necessarily approved. This doesn’t mean that spiders will reject the link. It just indicates that the link has no connection with your own website. Your website won’t be harmed in case there is a link to your website with a rel=nofollow.
NOTICE: the only correct way is to add a rel="nofollow" and not rev="nofollow" or ref="nofollow"
How do you use it ?
The rel=nofollow can be used by text links (with or without an anchor text) and an image on the left. Take a look at our example for a textlink : <a href://www.testdomain.com/page.html">Visit this website</a>
After adding this tag it will look like the following :
<a href://www.testdomain.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit this website</a>
If the Google Spider sees this tag it will :
- NOT follow this link. It won’t mean that your page can’t or won’t be indexed but this isn’t because of the rel=nofollow link. All other links that link to your page (without the nofollow) will be followed.
- add NO value to the link in relation to the Page Rank. Page rank is nothing more than how other sites validate external sites to your website. The more votes (or links) are placed to your page, the more change you get being placed higher in the SERPS. The rel=nofollow avoids that the link gets a vote. More about links and the power of linking was reviewed earlier.
- add NO value to the anchortext. If you link to a page with keywords that appear on that page and in the title, it WILL add more value to that link, so that is the best way to get more links. With this tag Google will not add any value to the anchor text.
Where should you add meta tags ?
You may add meta tags to all of your webpages, so not only in the first index page. Make sure that on every page relevant meta tags are added. Add keywords and phrases that are relevant and correspond to the text and the language on that specific page. It might be a lot of work to add specific meta tags to each page but you will notice in time that it works!