What is nofollow

The “nofollow” value for the rel attribute was introduced in 2005 by Google and almost simultaneously was adopted by all major search engines (Yahoo, MSN). It is intended to avoid the effects of spam, for example, in Internet forums and weblogs.

Many spammers try to frequent placement of links on their websites advertised by their link popularity and increase their PageRank value and thus to improve the position of their site within the search results on search engines (search engine spamming). Since such links are undesirable and can be in many places where visitors add links to all the links that will automatically add the rel = “nofollow” attribute.

The Articles marked are links from the perspective of search engines that are virtually non-existent. Nofollow is an addition to the so-called meta tag “robots are.” This will affect all links from a website.

The attribute rel = “nofollow” is in addition to enabling the individual to exclude individual links. The value of nofollow is a non-standard extension of the rel attribute. The expansion of the author-defined values, however, allowed HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 within it. The robots meta tag is in contrast to Robots Exclusion standard.

Criticism

Critics of the no-follow links complain that Nofollows changes the evaluation result of the search engine. They see this as a distortion, leading to the loss of explanatory power. Critics argue that the site owner is not responsible for the search engines take the trouble to distinguish between potential spam and desired links.

Proponents use the same argument and say that they do not regard it as their duty to serve the search engines as a source for calculating the placement of external websites. The sense is the use of NoFollow for example, when links are used for navigation and to prevent the search engines following the prints or feedback link.

Legal Situation

In legal terms, operators of Web sites that use Nofollow can decide at their own discretion. A legal obligation to take foreign interests into consideration, does not exist.