How to Add Nofollow Attribute to an Outbound Link

Link juice is what makes the web go around, well at least it is as far as Google page rank is concerned. Chances are if you have a high page rank then several high or higher ranked pages link to your page.

But how does Google know who is linking to whom? Well in simple terms the Google bot or crawler visits your page and that includes looking for any links they contain. Now its a machine and simple does as its told so unless you tell it otherwise it will follow where a link leads. That's fine, but since page rank has to do with authority it sees your link as a recommendation so if you have high PR some link juice will flow to the link you have recommended.

But just suppose for one minute that the link you provide is to a "bad neighbour," some information that you want to share but are unsure of its authority? Perhaps that page links to other bad neighbours. Perhaps you have been naughty in Google's eyes and are selling links or writing paid for posts that link to your sponsor! Whatever the reason the outcome can lead to a loss of PR and worse still pages dropping out of serps.

Now you can actually tell the Google bot not to follow the link by adding a "nofollow" attribute or by using a robot txt files. But since Blogger does not allow you to control your robot text file lets look at the nofollow attribute which you can control. If a "nofollow" attribute is in the code relating to the link then the Google bot does NOT follow the link. It might still index it but it doesn't associate your page with the link destination so no link juice flows from your page.

At the top of this page I inserted a link to Google. When I opened the HTML view in Blogger text editor this is what the link code to Google looked like i.e. BEFORE I made it NOFOLLOW.



Now here I have inserted the attribute "nofollow" notice where I inserted it. Spacing is important, leave a space after the inverted commas enclosing the link before you insert, rel= 'nofollow' in this format. Here you can see the link AFTER I made it NOFOLLOW.



Finally just a few words on using nofollow. I am no SEO expert (are there any) but I can see the value for using nofollow sometimes externally. However I do not use it internally on my pages since good internal linking leads to better site structure leaving less orphaned pages(ones that don't link to anything) and therefore getting more of your pages indexed.

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