The Myth Of NoFollow Tag

Nofollow tag is an automated tag on every blog now and almost on all sites too that accepts user suggestion as comments or via guest book. So what is this tag and what's its purpose?

According To Wikipedia (Yeah wikipedia knows SEO too)

"nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index."

According To Google

"When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

nofollow tag look like this

rel=nofollow

Many webmaster and SEO's believe the wikipedia and Google definition for nofollow tag that is nofollow tag effects a site ranking in Google Search Results. In many seo and webmaster forums we have seen a lot of debate on this issue, which always result in two conclusion. One is of course according to google point of view, that nofollow effect ranking position. But there is also some SEO who believe in somethin else. According to them NOFOLLOW only effects pagerank of a webpage and not ranking.

According to those SEO's

"The new nofollow link tag is supposed to provide webmasters with the opportunity to add a link to their website without leaking PageRank to the page they are linking to."

According to PageRank Theory

All links on a page which have some page rank got equally divided part of that pagerank to them too. This phenomena also known as Page Rank Dilution.

Here is a complete info about Page Rank: Google Page Rank

For example If a page has 4 page rank. And it contains 10 links on it of other websites than these 10 links get equally divide Page Rank Love from that page. This will increase the page rank points of those 10 pages, have their links on that page.

So what is the reality? Which theory is true and which one is false?

And yes! you may not believe it but 2nd theory is true.

It has been experimented by ME (OK I am not giving you any single detail of those experiments for the obvious reason, but sharing with you the proven result. So still I am good) and many other SEO'z too that link with nofollow tag doesn't affect a web page ranking. In fact it may count as a normal link and play its role in enhancing your ranking as number of links increases.

And since nobody caring a damn about Page Rank now days except Google itself, so these nofollow tags are pretty USELESS. For prove, you can analyze backlinks of some sites on 1st page of google and amazed to find that many of them have their links from blogs using nofollow tag. May be you can't see them for highly targeted keywords but remember Google is sorting out result manually for those keywords. Giving you a little common sense hint that if a page has 5 page rank with 100 links pointing to it from other blogs and you have a nofollow link of your website on that page, what do you think your link worth? Or lets have a fun experiment...Find an .edu blog and comment on some post of it. In NAME section put your keyword or simply put your web page url in comment. Since all blogs have nofollow tags installed automatically, so your this link is a nofollow link. After some days you can see this link as your edu backlink and an increase in your website authority.

So I am not advising you to do spam blogs via comments, but to acknowledge you that nofollow tag is only a myth and it doesn't negatively effect your ranking or its only a myth that a link with nofollow tag have no benefit.

So! Happy commenting.