Nofollow, do you follow?

Much has been said a lately about nofollow and Google’s action on paid links. According to Google, paid links devalue their search results. One of the factors in Google’s PageRank weighting model is the inbound links to a site. PageRank is more like a popularity vote for a site. The more inbound links a site has, the more popular it is among all the other sites. People will link to a site when they find something of interest to them or something of importance of which they would like to share with other readers. Matt Cutts the head of Google webspam team has said that the best links are not paid or exchanged, but earned and given by choice. When people starts buying links to increase their PageRank, according to Google, the quality of their search results is affected, hence the harsh action taken against paid links is to weed these out. Google has warned everyone years ago that more severe action will be taken and now it has come for the warning to take effect.

Google introduced the concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow in the year 2005. When a nofollow attribute is included in a link, it is actually telling the search engine spiders not to index the page the link is pointing to. An example of how the attribute rel=”nofollow” is included in the link is shown here.

<a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>an example</a>

The site that the link is pointing to will not be penalized in any way but it will not gain in PageRank because the search engine spiders will regard the link as irrelevant and will not index the page.

Since its introduction, a number of blog software makers such as Wordpress, Blogger, Six Apart, LiveJournal, MSN Space have adopted it. Nofollow attribute is good in a way that it helps to prevent spammer from getting credits for their spam links which they leave at every blog comments that they can lay their hands on. They may get some curious visitors who may click on their links but the links will not improve their PageRank.

Google’s action on paid links has stepped on the toes of many and some argued that Google PageRank has actually damaged the web. It uses inbound links as a factor in weighting the search results and that has led many to optimize for that system and even game it. According to Google, this inevitable and now to cover the damaged done they introduced the nofollow attribute. Is rel=nofollow able to rectify the problem? Your guess is as good as mine.

It looks like they have no solutions to detect a paid link and now they are asking all webmasters to help to publish only quality links by including rel=nofollow in all paid links. The request comes with a warning, “If you don’t help us, you will be sorry!”