igorberger - 6:06 am on Jul 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

I am seeing a lot of negativity in the Webmasters, Developers and SEO's world over the rel="nofollow" tag.
It is being abused by Websites to hoard PR which is against Google Quality Guidelines.
With the use of rel="nofollow" for signatures, comments and partner links, a Website is trying to manipulate Google PR algorithm.

I would not be supprised if Udi the Google VP of engineering is working to encompass a penalty for Websites that do not have external links because of rel=nofollow".

I do not use it and would recommend that others use it wisely if there is a need, because the next Google algorithm update may penalize Websites for over excessive use of rel="nofollow"

Also, I see it being confused with disallow in robots.txt and noindex, follow meta tag.

Many Webmaster have an impression that if you put rel="nofollow" on an anchar link on your Web page that it will not be indexed.
Also many SEO's recommned to do that to get a page out of supplementary index.
Both beleives are wrong...

A page can have links to it from another Website so even if you put the rel="nofollow" that page will get indexed.

Once in a supplementary if you tell Google rel="nofollow" Google will not need to crawl it, but will leave it in the supplementary.

So please use disallow in robots.txt or for od and dynamic content use noindex, follow meta tag.

Igor

P.S. If anyone has good usage for rel="nofollow" please contribute to this thread.