“Nofollow” is a concept used in the field of Search Engine Optimization[1] (SEO). Introduced to combat blog[4] comment spam, it is a type of link relation that signals a link is not an endorsement. Its specification is copyrighted by its authors and is implemented in a webpage’s coding. Search engines like Google[2], Yahoo, and Bing respect this attribute, using it as a guideline for page ranking; they do not consider nofollow links when calculating the PageRank[3]. Over time, the use of nofollow has been repurposed by SEO professionals to control PageRank flow within sites, leading to controversy. Google has introduced new attributes such as rel=sponsored and rel=ugc to address these criticisms, offering more link qualification options. It’s important to note that different search engines may interpret nofollow in various ways.
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nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>
. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow
setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.