Internet Courtesy and “nofollow” Tags

I had an interesting discussion about external hyperlinks I’d like to regurgitate here. Please, feel free to call me out on any of the assumptions below:

After a recent visit from our neighborhood SEO consultant, our office was stirring with debate about what their latest findings really meant. (Or rather, what their latest findings really found.)

One item of interest was the use of hyperlinks in stories. Though we don’t automatically link keywords to their corresponding tags in our database, our stories range from link-free to link-farms.

Our consulting firm hinted that each additional link added to a story or page decreases the value of all the links on said page, something I agree with. But the firm continued by stating that this loss can be negated by wrapping certain URLs in nofollow tags.

Wikipedia, my favorite scholarly reference, defines the tag as follows:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

We already have a Dreamweaver macro that identifies external URLs and uses target=”_new” to open them in a new browser tab, but using nofollow on all outward facing links seemed like overkill.

With Google’s page-rank in mind, if every site that links to ours nofollow-ed links pointing to our pages, our page-rank value would diminish. Likewise, we contribute no value to other sites we linked to if we used nofollow. It’s modern prisoner’s dilema. In terms of SEO, it’s in everyone’s best interest to play nicely and pass page value to the pages they reference.

For example, a webpage’s page-rank value increases when it is linked to from sites a search engine considers valuable and authorative, such as those hosted on .edu, .org, .gov, and .mil domains. (Some circles also believe that Wikipedia.org’s link carry a dispropritionate amount of weight that goes towards page rank.) Page-rank is also said to fluctuate by the amount of links contained in the body–not those links arrayed in widgets surrounding the content, a subject we’ll visit later.

That said, the only places nofollow tags should be used is the comments sections. It’s an effective way to give webmasters control over what value they pass to the pages readers link to.