Submitted on:  04/17/2007

In January of 05, a new attribute was born, and adopted by at least the three major Search Engines.

The attribute was originally  introduced  by Google, MSN, and Yahoo  as an attempt to cut down on blog comment spam.

A lot of questions have been raised since then in regard to the exact meaning of  the nofollow attribute.

From Googles Blog when the attribute was announced.

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

The statement on Google's blog seems pretty clear to me.  Google won't give any link juice to the link.  According to some comments on Matt Cutts blog, a webmaster can link to a bad neighborhood without any fear of being penalized in any way because he linked to a bad neighborhood.

Vanessa Fox  from Webmaster Central seems to be saying in this blog posts (In Feb. 07)  that Google won't index the link if the rel="nofollow"  attribute is used.

Avoid infinite crawls. For instance,if your site has an infinite calendar, add a nofollow attribute to links to dynamically-created future calendar pages. Each search engine may interpret the nofollow attribute differently, so check with the help documentation for each. Alternatively, you could use the nofollow meta tag to ensure that search engine spiders don't crawl any outgoing links on a page, or use robots.txt to prevent search engines from crawling URLs that can lead to infinite loops.

In that article she links to a page at the Webmaster Help Center, which seems to me at least to give conflicting information.

Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page, but you can also instruct Googlebot not to crawl individual links by adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink. When Google sees the attribute rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.. 

Adam Lasnik of Google confirmed what Vanessa said in a comment at Google Groups.

Does Google crawl a rel="NOFOLLOW" tagged link and not give it credit, or does it just stop at the link and not visit that page unless it's found elsewhere?

As Aaron correctly noted, the answer is the latter :)

Adam again confirmed this on my blog in this post What Does Rel=�NoFollow� Mean?

After Adam confirmed this on my blog, I added the rel="nofollow" to one link on my site which was showing up multiple times when doing an internal link check at Webmaster Central.  The link was for a shopper to view their shopping cart.  About a month later that view cart link was no longer showing as an internal link.

Personally I'm glad to get a clear stament from somone at Google about the meaning of the rel="nofollow".

About the Author:

Name:  Connie Shelton I\'m a Super Moderator at the IHY forums. I\'ve been involved in e-commerce since 1999. Spam-Whackers blog is more of a hobby site, which displays my dislike of all kinds of web spam. Find out more at http://www.spam-whackers.com