The "nofollow" Tag

This is big news for the search engine industry, and it's important that search engine optimizers and website owners take notice.

Google has introduced a new link tag, and it's ultimately designed to tell the search engines to ignore the link when it comes to calculating their algorithm. This new link tag is called rel="nofollow" and it can be added to any typical href link. By adding the tag to a link on your site, you're telling the search engines to ignore it. According to Google, "From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

Yahoo!, MSN Search, and other search engines are taking Google's lead and beginning to recognize this new link tag called the (rel="nofollow") tag.

This new (rel="nofollow") tag, though, may begin to be used on many other sites--you can begin using it immediately, in fact.

Some website directory owners might consider adding links to their directory but only removing the (rel="nofollow") tag if the link submitter pays them to remove the (rel="nofollow") tag.

Google recently commented on the issue, "We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author's site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We're working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target."

According to Ken Moss, the General Manger of MSN Search Dev & Test, "Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking...Over the coming weeks, our MSNBot crawler will start respecting this new tag, and sometime after that MSN Spaces will start to support this as well."