There are many reasons you may want to add nofollow tags to hyperlinks, the main reason being to block links from paying advertisers from benefitting from your PageRank.  Do you know how to add the nofollow tag to your hyperlinks?

There are 2 types of links: dofollow and nofollow.  When neither tag is present, the default setting is dofollow. The nofollow tag tells a search engine’s crawler not to give any weight or “Google juice” to the link you have posted.

An in-depth discussion of the benefits and uses of nofollow will be covered in another article.  For now, we’ll be focusing on how to add the nofollow tag to links when you know it should be there.

How to Add Nofollow Tags to Links

A regular link (to a helpful article, great post, or relevant blog) will be a normal, followed link.  Its code will look like this when you switch to the html view in your dashboard:

That normal code is how every regular followed link should look when you view its html. To add the nofollow tag in, you’ll add this snippet of html code to your existing link:

rel=”nofollow”

That one simple piece of code will prevent search engine spiders from following the link, in effect, giving no weight to the link.  In other words, the link juice from your page will not flow into that link or out to its corresponding site.

I’ve shown the nofollow tag in red in the example below so you can see the placement.  To add the nofollow tag, your html code will now look like this:

That’s all there is to it.  Adding nofollow tags is quick and easy to do when you know the proper way to modify your html code.  Remember that to be in compliance with Google and many other search engine’s policies, you’ll want to add nofollow tags to all paid links from advertisers. 

In a nutshell:  If you get compensation for the link, it’s best not to be flowing PageRank to the link.  Respectable webmasters and public relations reps know that building backlinks is something you do the old fashioned way – with great content and real relationships, NOT by buying links!

Matt Cutts is the head of the Web Spam (anti-spam) team at Google.  He spoke at the recent WordCamp 2009 in May of this year about how to boost your WordPress blog’s results in Google search.  WordCamp is an annual Wordpress conference that provides helpful information on Wordpress for both bloggers and developers alike.

We all want better rankings for our blogs, because that means more traffic and – if you’re doing things right – more money!  You’ll want to keep reading and watch the video to make this happen.

There’s always a lot of speculation and advice by SEOs, internet marketers, and more about what Google wants and the proper way to do things. I’ve found during my time as a problogger and SEO enthusiast that you’ll never get better advice on “the right way to do things” than when you get it directly from Google staff! 

Here is the link to Matt Cutts’ blog. If you really want to start increasing your Google knowledge, I recommend you go grab his RSS feed now.

Below is Matt Cutts’ video from WordCamp 2009 about how your blog can do better in Google. This is a substantial video at 46 minutes, so grab a coffee and bookmark this page in case you can’t watch the whole thing right now.  (Subscribers will have to click through to the site to watch the video.)

Matt Cutts Google Video Highlights

Advice for PageRank:

• Don’t obsess about getting more backlinks for your site.  You want to have people know about you and you want those people to be reputable.
• About being relevant and reputable- you want to stay on topic with your blogging, so that people are linking to you about things you want to be known for.

Lesser-Known Plugins Mentioned in Video:

• Cookies for Comments by Donncha O Caoimh (an awesome plugin developer). I’ve never tried this plugin before, but I’ll be testing it on one of our new blogs to see how well it does at blocking spammers from commenting.  Matt Cutts recommends using this in addition to Akismet.
• Enforce WWW Preference by Mark Jaquith.  This plugin helps with SEO by making sure all of your content is in either www or non-www, instead of split between both (essentially diluting your PageRank).