On encountering a nofollow link, the web crawlers or spy bots of a search engine do not crawl a website, which also prevents them from assigning a PageRank through a specific link that directs to the website. The nofollow link attribute tells Google that they neither want certain links on the website to be followed nor do they want the web pages’ quality assessment to be passed onto to the other pages that they are linked to. The process of creating a nofollow link involves adding rel=”nofollow” inside the anchor tag of the link. The attribute at the link level affects only those particular links that have the tag. The right nofollow link attribute is:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.thelink.com”>Link Text</a>
As the term suggests, ‘the nofollow Meta robots tag’ is the nofollow link attribute included in the Meta robots tag. While the former affects only a specific link and prevents it from getting indexed, this attribute affects indexing at a much higher level, which is the page level. When included, this tag prevents the web crawler from indexing all the links on that webpage. The syntax of the nofollow Meta robots tag is:
<Meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
The noindex Meta robots tag prevents a particular page from being displayed on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This tag uses a combination of the Meta robots tag (applied at the page level) along with the noindex attribute, which prevents the entire page from being indexed by the search engine. The syntax of the noindex Meta robots tag is:
<Meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
Using the nofollow and noindex attributes intelligently and effectively comes with practice. One of the most common mistakes most people make is using both a noindex and a nofollow tag when using a default noindex Meta robots tag is more appropriate. This should be done when you want to keep the internal pages and links private and away from search engines, but want to keep the website open to public visitors.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />
The above syntax tags all the links on the web page as nofollow and this should be done only when the links direct to pages that have duplicate content and other SEO problems or when you want to block them from PageRanking for strategic reasons. The nofollow link attribute is best used:
- In login pages, which cannot be indexed
- For paid links, when you sell advertising space to a company on your website or blog
- Where you are not sure about the quality of the link content
Even when you noindex a page, you may still want it to go through the search engine link evaluation process. The only situation where you might want to use the nofollow link in the blog content is when you reference a website, but do not want it to affect your reputation. The links that you post in your blog content should be trusted and verified by you. However, if you are trying to explain the concept of web spam or link farming, you may want to nofollow the reference links that you post as examples in your blog.