How to Use Nofollow Tags and Why You Need Them

There are occasions where you want to link to a website, but you don't want to transfer any "Google juice" to it. Advertising and affiliate links are a big example. If Google catches you passing PageRank from a paid link, they view it as spam, and you could end up being removed from Google's database.

There's an easy solution. Use the nofollow tag. Google won't follow the link, and you'll remain in good standing with the search engine. You can use a nofollow meta tag to negate links for an entire page, but this isn't necessary for every page. In fact, if you're a blogger you should be a good neighbor and give your favorite sites a boost. As long as they're not paying you for it.

You can use nofollow on individual links by simply typing rel="nofollow" after the link in the href tag. A typical link would look like:

<a href="http://thisIsJustAnExampleLink.com" rel="nofollow">Your anchor text here.</a>

That's all there is to it.

Keep in mind that the nofollow tag doesn't remove a site from Google's database. Google doesn't follow that instance of the link, but that doesn't mean the page won't appear in the Google database from links someone else created.

Not every search engine honors nofollow links or treats them the same way. However, the majority of Web searching is done with Google, so it makes a lot of sense to stick with Google's standard on this.