You Can Have My Link Juice
March 11th, 2012
I’ve been looking into SEO recently and ran into a interesting nugget of functionality called rel="nofollow". Though I’ve heard about it before, I never fully appreciated its implications until now.
What’s Nofollow?
The nofollow attribute tells search engines not to follow outbound links. Here’s an excerpt from Google’s page on nofollow (emphasis mine):
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using
nofollowcauses us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handlenofollowin slightly different ways.
If you add nofollow to outbound links on your website, you’re telling Google to not give your PageRank (a.k.a. link juice, a.k.a. the sweet currency of SEO) to whoever you link to.
Why Nofollow?
Nofollow was originally introduced by Google back in 2005 to discourage comment spam. At the time, there wasn’t really a good way to deal with comment spam, so a bunch of blogging platforms and sites adopted it.
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Today, lots of major sites (Wikipedia, Twitter, NY Times, etc) as well as many blogs use it. At the same time, most search engines honor it.
Why Not Nofollow?
From my perspective as a blogger, there is no good reason to use nofollow. First, we now have a much better way of dealing with comment spam: we filter it out. I personally use and highly recommend Akismet.
Second, there is something to be said for being a good internet citizen. After all, if someone takes the time to leave a comment and includes a link to their site, why shouldn’t they get my (albeit very diluted) link juice?
Unfortunately, WordPress enables nofollow by default and doesn’t give you a way to disable it. Fortunately, there are a bunch of plugins that do. I use Do Follow from Semilogic, but there are others as well.
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This post got 5 comments so far. Care to add yours?
Thanks for this post. I didn’t realize wordpress did this by default, and I would prefer to boost the ranks of other bloggers that comment on my site. I think your reasoning is quite sound — I already have a SPAM prevention plugin that works better than nofollow by far, so why penalize legitimate commenters?
Thanks Erik, glad you found it useful. I too wasn’t aware of WordPress’ default behavior (that’s actually primarily why I wrote the post).
Thanks Alex. I’ve been studying the effects of outbound links on blogs / websites in SEO context. I’m glad I have read this post.
Yes, comments in WordPress are nofollow links by default. This is to make bloggers feeling comfort as most of them would prefer this way.
Again, thanks! Hope to hear more from you soon.
Glad this was helpful Edmund, thanks for reading!
Blame it on Google Page Rank thingy. Can’t blame on bloggers too much, who doesn’t want higher page rank? In they need to be stingy of their link juice.
WordPress comment is no-follow by default soon after Google announce those Page Rank. That was a long time ago but (after checking today) I am surprised that Google’s own blogger platform also with no-follow in comments.