Demistifying the "nofollow" tag!

Also, Matt Cutts, the leading google spam fighter has expressed how the no follow tag should be used to identify ads, and when links are being sold, the no follow tag should evident. One notable exception to this is directories where Matt continued to state that directories may charge for the review process.

Pretty much what you hear about the No-Follow is a Myth ... Yep, thats right I said it .. It's a myth. Anyone that disagrees with this can as you are perfectly entitled to your opinion.

The No-Follow is meant to be for "No Follow" as the same suggest. This means nothing though because the fact is once a page/post is pinged the spider will pickup the link. Look at how successful ArticlesBase.com , iSnare.com, and many other directories are.. They use No-Follow but if you check your listings after submitting to these sites you will see that your articles get top listings.

Personally I do not worry about No-Follow myself .... If the sites is related to what I do and I have valued information to post that will be helpful then I will post...

James

What I like about no follow is encourages people to get links because of the quality traffic they will gain, and not just for pagerank and search results. Also, if you are selling links on your site, you have to be careful, as you can have some real problems if they are not No Follow.

Google is about to change it's own rules about the nofollow tag.

Search about it on google and you will see what I mean. There are quite a few concerned folk right now, especially bloggers.

Time will tell what happens.

Awesome - We all seem to be in agreement that it is not a waste of time

@James I totaly agree with you, if you have something constructive and of benefit then share it - follow or no follow it doesn't matter.

And the points made on paid links are totaly valid - I learned tha hard way when I first started out blogging. My first blog at Affiliate's Corner | Affiliate marketing cash pulling product reviews! picked up momentum pretty quick and with is a few weeks I was on page 1 of google for most of my keywords and post, I quickly gained a PR 2 within 2 months only to loose it due to too many outgoing links which were all do follow.

I set forth rectifying this and now am back to a PR1 and working to regain and improve on the 2 . I applied these stratergies to Blog Installation Service where am now very carefull on outgoing links and how many I do follow or have a no follow alt attached. The blog is just over 2 months old and already has a PR 2

So it pays to ballance between the two and at the same time not to be afraid of other sites being no follow.

Thanks to all of you that responded your input is very much appreciated - cheers!

I've said this til I was blue in the face. So...I don't say it anymore.

2 Rules of Life:

1. You can't fix stupid
2. You can't argue with an idiot

Now...watch someone come along and say they've proven that wrong, too. :rolleyes:

Here's a real-world example. Check out this article written by one of my writers, Wendell, and published on AB:

Are You Worried Your Spouse is Cheating?

AB uses "nofollow" throughout. The author has two links to one of his pages on another site, one in the text and one in the resource box. If you check Google for links to his article on the other site:

The 7 Signs of a Cheating Spouse - Different Subjects - www.DifferentSubjects.com

you will find that Google shows NO links to it. If, on the other hand, you run the link check at Yahoo you'll find that it shows eleven links to it.

i think even if the link is nofollow, having it allows people to go to your site if you provide interesting enough content. Twitter, Youtube etc...

How many times have you clicked a link on one of those pages?

From my personal experience, it seems like Google does pass some link love to nofollow links. I think a lot of it depends on the site that the link is displayed from. Recently, I tried to test this theory and used a few nofollow links to see if my SERPs would improve. Lo and behold, after adding 3 relevant nofollow links, my site moved up 2 positions. Take it for whatever it is worth.

This article may help demystify 'no follow' for you:

Should We Abandon 'No Follow' Tags? | Kikabink News - Internet Marketing News