This is a common question for webmasters. What is the impact of nofollow link attributes to the sites linked to? What does it mean if a website has nofollow attributes?

By the way, nofollow link attribute should not be confused with the noindex, nofollow in the meta tags. They are different. Noindex, nofollow on meta tags tells robots not to index or to follow the page thus it will not appear in search results and it will not be indexed on the search engine. The meta tag looks like this: . It is placed on the header before the tag of the page. This is one way to hide your thank you page to protect your product from being stolen.

Nofollow link attribute on the other hand looks like this: Click here. According to Google, attribute instruct robots not to crawl a specific link. This was created to eliminate spam comments on blogs.

Here is how Google handles nofollow links:

“We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

Continue reading about Nofollow Link Attribute.