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17 Dec, 2009

Rel=“nofollow” Exploitations?

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I came across an interesting thread on the Google Webmaster Help Forums today regarding potential nofollow exploitations. The question asked was whether a rel=”follow” attribute added to a HTML link would void the nofollow that is in place. Adding rel=”follow” of course does nothing on it’s own, but having two rel= attributes seems to cause Google to interpret the link differently.

The example the user posted was:

<a rel="follow" href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example</a>

Matt Cutts replied to the question with the following:

Good question. I’ve seen 1-2 other people wondering about this. The short answer is that we’ll make sure the rel=”nofollow” takes precedence. Otherwise spammers could exploit this.

His response implies that the issue could cause problems, but he didn’t say exactly when Google would eradicate the problem.

This potential exploit could allow spammers to use forums and blogs (where links tend to be nofollowed) to gain more valuable links back to their own websites. Until Google fixes the problem that is – which would be pretty soon I would imagine.

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15 Responses to "Rel=“nofollow” Exploitations?"

1 | Brad

December 22nd, 2009 at 12:11 pm

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Hmm I think the no follow would over ride the do follow…but who knows.

2 | Jonathon

December 29th, 2009 at 5:51 pm

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Why would “follow” even be noticed by Google? by default links are already “follow” so only “nofollow” would override that and if you put “follow” (assuming Google understood that tag) wouldn’t the corresponding “nofollow” tag override that too?

3 | marcus

December 29th, 2009 at 6:42 pm

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My understanding of what Matt stated that adding the dofollow tag would not work because the no follow would take precedence. In other words…you will not gain a backlink using this tactic.

4 | Kieron Hughes

December 29th, 2009 at 10:19 pm

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@Jonathon – The point being made is that the nofollow attribute recognised by Google would be overridden by adding a second ‘rel=’ tag into the link. Presumably the nofollow tag will take precedence, but Matt Cutts implied that it could be open to exploitations. I’m sure it will have been fixed by now though.

@marcus – I think Matt implied that it could be potentially exploited (as I’ve just mentioned), but the likelihood of that happening seems very slim – especially now.

5 | idgnarn

December 30th, 2009 at 10:52 am

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I think nofollow will over ride the follow, but there is no idea why google interpret it differently.

6 | joyce

December 31st, 2009 at 5:30 am

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ya i also think rel=”nofollow” takes precedence. Otherwise spammers could exploit.spammers to use forums and blogs where links tend to be nofollowed is used to get more back links to website.

7 | John Wood

March 3rd, 2010 at 2:50 pm

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All interesting, but would Google for instance note the content in the link?

e.g.

If a network site generates text such as “Widgets, gizmos and thingamabobs” would there be a boost to the site ‘mysite’ for those keywords even though pagerank would not be affected.

Since Google tends to uplift sites when lots of people are talking about them on networking sites the anewer would seem to be ‘yes’

8 | John Wood

March 3rd, 2010 at 2:53 pm

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Drat! did not expect forum to convert code into a link!

‘mysite.com’ rel=”nofollow”> Widgets, gizmos and thingamabobs

9 | SCRE

March 11th, 2010 at 5:08 am

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Should the attribute be used with or without quotes, or does it not matter?

rel=follow or rel=”follow”

I have see blog posts using both.

And is it valid in any case? It is not listed here:

http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/att_a_rel.asp

10 | Kieron Hughes

March 11th, 2010 at 8:39 pm

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Hi SCRE,

Best practice is to use the double quotes, so:

rel=”nofollow”

Although I do believe it will work without.

11 | Jeff

November 11th, 2010 at 11:46 pm

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I am going to comment on a couple of blogs to see if SEO analytics will show them as a follow link..

12 | john

December 20th, 2010 at 7:56 pm

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does anybody know the date seonetlinks is coming out? i heard it’s an amazing way to generate tons of traffic

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March 19th, 2011 at 3:10 pm

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