2.29.2008

"rel=no follow" is worthless unless youre too cool for school

I have been playing with rel=nofollow tags on some of my smaller sites and have found that when using it in every outbound link that has a low page rank - the site will actually rank worse. After scratching my head for about a half an hour I came to the realization that no follow tags actually tell google and yahoo:

"dont look anywhere in this link, not for keywords, or link information, or text, or anything else for that matter"

Which means if you link whore like you should in on page SEO that you're going to lose all those nicely placed keywords in the alt and title tags.

So all the hype of no follow tags to prevent page rank from bleeding out of a page are basically worthless. Unless that is, you're too cool for school. Sites with higher page rank can pull it off cause on page SEO isn't as mandatory as it would be with a page rank of 0 or 1.