nofollow and dofollow links

04 March, 2009

As part of a series of experiments we are going to carry out, we will have a look at nofollow and dofollow links and make an announcement.

A nofollow link is an anchor tag on a web page with rel attribute set to nofollow. An example of such a link is below:

The nofollow value was introduced by Google in 2005 in an effort to reduce spam. The problem was that people were commenting on blogs, leaving their URLs behind, only so as they could distribute their own links across the web. This was creating a lot of spam for bloggers, and so Google thought of a way to give no credit to the links, and this would in turn stop the people from posting needlessly.

And that is how the nofollow works. Google still follows the link to the destination site when its bots are crawling the web, but it does not give pass on any of the host site's PageRank power like it normally would.

So what is a dofollow link? There is not any actual dofollow link, however the term dofollow is starting to get used to indicate a link which is the not nofollow, or a normal link. Like below:

Now the challenge is on to try and find the dofollow sites and get your link on there. nofollow has reduced to spam comments to a certain extent, but it has not eradicated them. We wonder if the people who still post these comments know they are doing it in vane...

In a nutshell, which is how we like to explain things here, that is what nofollow and dofollow links are all about. Now it is time for the announcement. fcOnTheWeb is a dofollow site. That means, if you post a comment on one of our articles, your site will get some of the PR power from fcOnTheWeb. At this point in time you must first register before you can post a comment, but once this little experiment has 'been left to soak' we will perhaps look at changing that too.

ferrari_chris