Matt Cutts told Mike McDonald of WebProNews about something new from Google: the search advertising company opened a little help center on the topic of nofollows and links.
Google began advocating the nofollow attribute as a way for webmasters to tell Google's crawlers not to count a given link toward the PageRank of the site pointed to by the link. This attribute would help webmasters avoid the sting of being punished over paid links, which Google dislikes due to the way they can "game" the search rankings.
Webmasters had questions about nofollow, the answers to which ended up flung across the Internet. Blogger Li Evans asked Google in February why that situation hadn't been cleared up by collecting all the answers in one place.
As Google's well-known webspam fighter Matt Cutts told WebProNews how Google finally addressed the situation. They opened up the NoFollow Help Center within the webmaster help pages to help clarify the topic.
As Google explains, nofollow helps manage issues like comment spam, crawl prioritization, and the touchy issue of paid links. Watch Matt Cutts go over this attention-getting topic only on WebProVideo:
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Comments
I like nofollow. It helps
I like nofollow. It helps me control the link flow on my own site.
Does it really help fight spam?
Only a small percentage of people in the SEO field are aware of the NoFollow and DoFollow links. So if the other people link to some sites they like, they would not be even aware of that it can invoke Google penalty. And blog spam has not stopped in spite of the nofollow links which are default in blog comments.
nofollow
@linkchannels
nofollow is used for websites you want to connect to but don't feel deserves your "vote". Each link you make without the nofollow tag is considered a vote of approval to search engines. If you "approve" a website by linking to it without a nofollow tag and it is a "bad" site (one that is trying to cheat google) then that means to google that you think cheating is ok. The more you link to "bad" sites, the more google thinks you are a cheat.
If you don't know a website well, add rel="nofollow" to the link. People won't tell a difference.
I don't mind nofollow being
I don't mind nofollow being used on some purchased links, but making it a standard of blogging software is a bit unnecessary I feel as spam can easily be moderated.
Google isnt the only
search engine in the world. How do Yahoo and MSN use this attribute?
A google invention purely...
how will google..
But how will google know the difference? what if i just link to a site because i like the site. will i be penalized for it?
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