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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4 | Kieron Hughes
December 29th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
@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.