You Can Have My Link Juice

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 nofollow causes 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 using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in 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. 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.