Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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.
Of course putting it on all outbound links would be stupid - for example because outbounds to good on-topic sites can give a benefit to a page. But sometimes there are links where I'd like to put the attribute on - off-topic links, or sites I'm not sure about their reputation etc.
<a href=http://www.example.com/>This is a great link!</a><a href=http://www.example.com/ rel="nofollow"> I can't vouch for this link</a>
Of course some webmasters will abuse it, and maybe Google will find a way to detect and penalize it.
and....
I understand google only crawls a certain number of links on a page. Does Google include the links with nofollow tag in its counting?
thanks!
Iīm using the nofollow tag to prevent Google from following some of my internal links as those links just show the same content of the page but e.g. in alphabetical order. Following this link and indexing the output would only lead to duplicate content (I guess). Is the use of the nofollow ok there?
I'd call this overoptimisation.
I understand google only crawls a certain number of links on a page. Does Google include the links with nofollow tag in its counting?
Where did you hear this?
Google sais in the guidelines that it follows at least 100 links on a page, and I know about pages with over 1000 links followed by Google. The bigger problem is exceeding 100kB limit, but there are serious rumours this limit is no longer in use.
But what's the sense to make a page with 100 links? From the point of a user, I'd hate such a mess. And your PageRank would be splitted between them completely.
So how many links do you intend to put on a page?
I could see using it for affiliates who use javascript or other ways that will lead to errors for googlebot like a link to a script.
Is this good SEO?
<a href=example.htm rel="nofollow">I can't vouche for this link</a>
<a href=example.htm rel="nofollow">I can't vouche for this link</a>
<a href=example.htm rel="nofollow">I can't vouche for this link</a>
<a href=example.htm rel="nofollow">I can't vouche for this link</a>
<a href=example.htm rel="nofollow">I can't vouche for this link</a>
in the Google guidelines you can read "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)" . Thatīs why I was asking.
But what's the sense to make a page with 100 links?
Right now, the WMW home page has 136 hrefs linking to 118 unique URLs.
Makes sense to me.
While it is possible to put several hundred links on a page and still have it work well for users, I think it is a good practice to take the time to think about every link on your page when you go over 100.
For example, if you run a directory and you have 300 links in one category, it might be time to split that category up into a few different subcategories.
Or click on a slashdot story and start counting links. And what about all those archives of mailing lists, or just about any forum.
NoFollow tag was created with the purpose to devalue spammed links, not to prevent crawler from following them. Granted search engine can also not bother following those URLs, but its not the main purpose of "nofollow" tag.
More importantly by its nature "nofollow" attribute is meant to be used for external links, thus whatever meaning of nofollow is used by a particular search engine it means that it will apply to external pages.
