Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?
-
I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML?
I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.
-
I don't think so either, but you never know. Simple enough test to run to see if Google recognizes a "follow" or "dofollow" tag, simple enough test to run that's for sure. If it is hardcoded in the link code it will override any external nofollow tag.
-
Hi, what I meant was whether I should be looking for robot txt at the top of the page or somesuch
-
Hi Irvnig
Thanks for the response but the issue of adding tags doesn't apply as it's not my site.
-
AFAIK, there is no way to "sneakily" no-follow a link. You no-follow a link by adding rel=nofollow. If rel=nofollow isn't there, the link is followed.
-
test it to see if for some reason it is recognized, just for fun.
if something on a site is nofollowed by default and doesn't show up in the source code of that link (meaning it is declared in another piece of code), add a rel="follow" and a rel="dofollow" tag and see if it overrides the nofollow by using a firefox plugin tool that highlights nofollow links for you (you should already have this installed if you are an SEO)
-
The only other place I've seen that is in spam blog comments (as a desperate attempt to override the blog's default "no-follow")....
Yep, that's what I've read as well.
Now he's changed it to rel="dofollow" (no, me neither) -- which strikes me as even more gobbledegook.
Obviously I'm going to ask him to leave out the attribute altogether. But what other attributes should I be looking for on the page source (CTRL+U) to ensure he hasn't sneakily no-followed all the links on the page?
-
GoogleBot does obey the rel="nofollow" attribute.. as for rel="follow" - I don't think so. The only other place I've seen that is in spam blog comments (as a desperate attempt to override the blog's default "no-follow")....
-
It's a way of controlling the link power from a site. They're passing on the link juice to you.
If you want the search engines to see that link on the external blog, then what they have done is a good thing. They could have also just left that parameter out altogether.
People can put rel="nofollow". This means "don't pass link juice". You could interpret it as a directive to the world that whilst you are providing the link to the site, you don't endorse it.
From Google:
"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Organic search traffic stats "leaking" into other channels?
Hi Everyone I have a website and am slowly getting to grips with SEO. Last week I enabled a new channel in google analytics which was "email" so I could track effectiveness of the weekly emails we send out. The good news is that a ton of traffic is now being assigned to the email "channel" in GA but my organic search traffic in channels is now down week on week. That feels odd as my overall traffic to the site is up, week on week. Does anyone have any experience of new channels coming on stream and canniballising old ones? Could it be that some of the traffic associated to organic search previously was actually coming from my email, I just didn't know it? thanks all!
Technical SEO | | NappyValleyNet1 -
Our rankings for "Tree Service" dropped last month
Hi, we've had a page www.savatree.com/tree-service.html which was ranking top 1-12 on the google rankings but has complete dropped out. We don't have any duplicate errors from that page on here. Do you have any suggestions? We do rank highly on Bing and Yahoo (1-2 pages). We can't figure whats going on.
Technical SEO | | SavATree0 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | | SeaCandyTackle0 -
Does rel="canonical" support protocol relative URL?
I need to switch a site from http to https. We gonna add 301 redirect all over the board. I also use rel="canonical" to strip some queries parameter from the index (parameter uses to identify which navigation elements were use.) rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but Google recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. So here my question, did you see any issue using relative protocol in rel="canonical"? Instead of:
Technical SEO | | EquipeWeb0 -
Site architecture & breadcrumbs
Hi A client hasn't structured site architecture in a silo type format so breadcrumbs are not predicating in a topical hierarchy as one would desire (or at least i think one would prefer) For example: say the site is called www.fruit.com and it has a category called 'types of fruit' and then sub/content pages called things like 'apples' and 'pears'. So in terms of architecture that should be: www.fruit.com/types-of-fruit/apples and www.fruit.com/types-of-fruit/pears etc etc The client has kept it all flat so instead architecture is: www.fruit.com/types-of-fruit and www.fruit.com/apples and www.fruit.com/pears As a result breadcrumbs follow suit and hence since also not employing logical predication dont reflect the topical & sub-topical hierarchy I have seen that some seo's at least used to think this was better for seo since kept the page/s nearer the root but surely its better to structure site architecture in a logical topical hierarchy so long as dont go beyond say 3 or 4 directories/forward slashes in the url's? Also is it theoretically possible to keep url structure as is (flat) and just edit/customise the breadcrumbs to reflect a topical hierarchy in a silo structure rather than change the entire site architecture & required 301'ing etc in order to do this (or is that misleading or just not possible?) Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Penalization for Duplicate URLs with %29 or "/"
Hi there - Some of our dynamically generated product URLs somehow are showing up in SEOmoz as two different URLs even though they are the same page- one with a %28 and one with a 🙂 e.g., http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ http://www.company.com/ProductX-(-etc/ Also, some of the URLs are duplicated with a "/" at the end of them. Does Google penalize us for these duplicate URLs? Should we add canonical tags to all of them? Finally, our development team is claiming that they are not generating these pages, and that they are being generated from facebook/pinterest/etc. which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Is that right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
Should I be using use rel=author in this case?
We have a large blog, which it appears one of our regional blogs (managed separately) is simply scraping content off of our blog and adding it to theirs. Would adding rel=author (for all of our guest bloggers) help eliminate google seeing the regional blog content as scraped or duplicate? Is rel=author the best solution here?
Technical SEO | | VistageSEO0 -
.Rel=author
For the purpose of implementing rel=author, 1. Whether http://www.ultraseo.com/blogs/ is my "Author page" 2. Where should i link from my Google profile to website http://www.ultraseo.com/ I mean, in which tab or section in Google profile should i link back to website ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050