Misuse of rel="nofollow" Tags

Why use rel="nofollow" tags?

rel="nofollow" tags were initially introduced by Google to help prevent comment spam. In other words, to prevent spammers from bombarding your site with links to their in the hope of gaining link popularity and Page Rank points. Most search engines have now adopted use of this tag, which basically tells the search engine to do three things:

• NOT follow through to that page.
• NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
• NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.

The abuse of nofollow - hoarding PageRank

The problem is that many developers are using nofollow to "hoard PR" (hoard PageRank). In other words, they add nofollow tags to any links pointing outside their site. While this may not have a negative effect under the tags current handling, Google notes that they are leaving their interpretation of the tag open based on initial results. What does this mean? Knowing Google, I would not be surprised if they integrated treatment of the nofollow tag into their results algorithms, meaning they may use it, for example, to identify sites with a disproportionate number of links in as opposed to out - in other words, too many nofollow tags. After all, if the tag was designed to combat spam links, a site that is littered with nofollow tags will therefore be looked at as one that is littered with links to spammy sites. I can't imagine that's viewed favorably.

Detecting rel="nofollow" on other pages

There's an easy way to detect rel="nofollow" links on other pages, aside from viewing the source code. Simply define a custom style for the nofollow tag. Most of today's browsers allow you to define a user style sheet. We'll show you the locations of these for Firefox and Opera.

Setting a Custom (User) Stylesheet in Firefox, Opera, etc.

In Firefox you can style your nofollow tag by adding a statement such as the following to userContent.css (in your profile directory - under C:\Documents and Settings\%user name%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%profile name%\chrome\userContent-example.css), making sure you rename it to userContent.css (remove -example):

a[rel~="nofollow"] { border: 1px dotted red; background-color: #EED3DE !important }

This will add a light red background and dotted red border to links using nofollow tags.

In Opera, the user.css file is located by default in C:\Program Files\Opera\Styles\user.css. You can specify the location of your user stylesheet by browsing to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Content, and selecting the "Style Options" button.

Check Your PageRank

Use our PageRank Calculator to calculate your site's PR (coming soon!)