Difference between meta "nofollow" and rel="canonical"

[shaunm]

Hi All,

My understanding about the use of <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" /> & <a href="signin.php" rel="nofollow">sign in</a> is that

The first one doesn't crawl any links going out of the page that the meta is used. By crawling I mean that Google will not collect those links for the index purpose, it will simply neglect them like they don't exist. But it might crawl and index them from various other pages that these links might be linked from.

The second one doesn't actually share the link juice/authority/credit with the link used in rel="canonical". This mostly helps the blog comments section from being spammed.

But it looks like I was wrong and that both does that same and the later one is most preferable one for Google as per this post by Google: [support.google.com...]

Is that correct? Can you please share your thoughts?


Thanks!

[JD_Toims]

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" /> is essentially the same as putting rel="nofollow" on every <a> element on the page, so if you don't want any links crawled [usually not the case since allowing the main nav of a site to be crawled shouldn't normally hurt anything] you can simply add the meta or run it in the header with an X-Robots-Tag -- If you want some links on a page crawled but don't want or aren't sure about others, such as user contributed links, then it's better to just add rel=nofollow to the appropriate <a> element(s).

[aakk9999]

Both are the same, the difference is that one affects all links on the page, the other the link it is placed on.

Google does not prefer one over the other, they just say you have more granular control over links using rel="nofollow" (if you need it)

[shaunm]

Thanks @JD_Toims and aakk9999 for the clarification! :-)