Comments on: Rel=“nofollow” Exploitations?

By: Kieron Hughes

Kieron Hughes — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:39:52 +0000

Hi SCRE,

Best practice is to use the double quotes, so:

rel=”nofollow”

Although I do believe it will work without.

By: SCRE

SCRE — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:08:27 +0000

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

By: John Wood

John Wood — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:53:56 +0000

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

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

By: John Wood

John Wood — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:50:48 +0000

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’

By: joyce

joyce — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:30:54 +0000

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.

By: idgnarn

idgnarn — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:52:14 +0000

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

By: Kieron Hughes

Kieron Hughes — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:19:53 +0000

@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.

By: marcus

marcus — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:42:58 +0000

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.

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:51:33 +0000

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?

By: Brad

Brad — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:11:32 +0000

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