a link that Search Engines won't follow

[zerillos]

How can I make a link that googlebot won't fallow, but my users will still be able to click on it and go to that url?

Can this be made without the "nofallow" tag? (maybe some kind of redirect or smth...anything)

Thank you!

[leadegroot]

javascript should do what you want.

[zerillos]

I'm not all that good at javascript
maybe you can help me with some sample code :)

Thank you!

[lfgoal]

According to Matt Cutts and google this is the reason why the rel=nofollow attribute was created.

[Philosopher]

Yes, use rel=nofollow attribute in the href tag of the link you don't want followed.

Javascript, unless it is encrypted, is still followed by Google. They've been doing this for a couple of years now.

However, if you want to make SURE that the target page is not indexed, you may also want to add that page to the robots.txt or add a noindex meta tag to the target page.

[zerillos]

Will google penalize me if i do the following thing?

filter googlebot with HTTP_USER_AGENT golbal :
if NOT spider show the active outbound link so users can click it
if spider don't show the link (or just show the text of the link without href)

(I'm trying to get goolebot not to follow some of the links. I think what I have described above it's called cloaking and google doesn't approve of that...but it's not done to influence the serp's with pages stuffed with keywords....)

I'm showing the users one page and googlebot a different page so....I want to know if google will penalize me fot this.

Thank you!

[leadegroot]

Showing different content to Googlebot and visitors is specifically against Google's TOS.
Yes, if they catch you they will penalise you.

[tedster]

use rel=nofollow attribute in the href tag of the link you don't want followed.

That's not the way I understand the rel="nofollow" attribute. In fact, I thought it was a poor choice of name because what it really means is "I don't vouch for this link" -- or in GoogleSpeak, don't transfer any PageRank here.

But as for following the link, or spidering to see if the url resolves and adding it to the index? No search engine I know of ever said they won't actually follow or index the target url when it has a rel="nofollow" attribute. Just that the link will not help the target page to rank well.