Whilst we at eyefall try to avoid industry jargon as much as possible, there is one bit of search-speak which anyone interested in online business should be familiar with, and that is the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

This is a piece of code which was agreed on by Google, Yahoo! & MSN back in 2005 in an attempt to combat link spam. Whilst Google has always been (reasonably) clear on what it will do when it finds links marked with the ‘nofollow’, there has often been confusion about how some of the other engines deal with it. And the reason that this is of particular interest is due to Wikipedia’s decision to add the ‘nofollow’ tag to all links to external sites from its pages due to the amount of spam that was being placed on Wikipedia (although it seems like the rule doesn’t apply to sites that Wikipedia owns).

To try and bring an end to this confusion, Search Engine Journal contacted Google, Yahoo!, MSN & Ask to find out how they treat links with the ‘nofollow’ tag, although at the time of writing MSN hadn’t responded. And this is how the results break down:

• Google - Won’t even follow such links, so? pages at the end of ‘nofollow’ links won’t be indexed by Google
• Yahoo! - Will follow the links to find & index new pages, but give the link no weight in their algorithm
• Ask - State that they never officially supported the ‘nofollow’ tag, which suggests that they follow these links, and use them in their calculations.

But what Loren at SEJ points out, and which I would always try to explain, is that even if ‘nofollow’ links don’t add to your SEO, they can drive direct traffic to your site (especially from a traffic behemoth like Wikipedia) and that’s something that anyone should be able to understand.

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