Using NoFollow As Part Of SEO

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

The NoIndex and NoFollow tags are often used as part of a pages search engine optimization strategies. The reasons are many and varied and can be used either in the page header meta tags or within a page.

There is often disagreement as to how, when and where you should use these tags in your search engine optimization programs. Ultimately you need to understand what you doing and why. A NoFollow meta tag in the page header will tell the search engines not to follow any of the links on that page. Likewise the NoIndex meta tag in the page header will result in that page not being indexed by the search engines.

Those are the theories. However the search engines themselves are not perfect and, particularly with the NoFollow tag, have been known to follow links. This is one of the reasons why so many web owners comment spam sites, even when the NoFollow clearly in use.

SeoBook has published a good chart comparing the various uses of these tags. He points out that overuse of a NoFollow tag within pages may be frowned upon by search engines if they think they are being used to sculpt PageRank as part of the search engine optimization strategy.

For most website owners, using these tags where and when required will not present any problems. For many bloggers, their software automatically uses the NoFollow for comments and this does not draw disapproval from the search engines.

Used judiciously, NoFollow and NoIndex can help with a sites search engine optimization strategies. As with all things, abuse it and try to work the system and the search engines may penalize you.