The No-Follow Attribute

As per my recent comment on Justin’s SEO Zombie site, I have been experimenting with the nofollow attribute.

The nofollow attribute is a piece of HTML used in your links that is intended to tell search engines that the page you are linking to should not influence that particular page’s search engine ranking.

In essence, you are linking to another website, but not endorsing it, per se.

So, I was playing around with a website I have had up for about five years. This is a niche tourism-related website, and I routinely add external links to websites that are related to that specific page’s content at no charge (yet!).

The trouble is (or so I suspect), is that because the site has relatively few inbound links, and several pages have more than 20 or so external links, that Google may have applied some sort of paid-link or link exchange penalty.

With this in mind, I selected a page that was SEO’d to the max on-page. I.e. Keyword in title, H1, description, first para of content etc. This particular page was not targeting a very competitive keyword phrase, yet had always struggled to get past page two of Google search results.

So, all I changed was adding the nofollow attribute to all the external links I had on that page (i.e. links not pointing to other pages on the site).

The results really surprised me – within about two weeks that same page now appears on the first set of Google results, sometimes as high as position four.

I’ve recently applied the same changes to another couple of similar pages on this website, so will let you know soon if I get the same results from the nofollow attribute.