Brief discussion: The use and analysis of nofollow tags

There was a time when Zac and Guoping had a dispute over nofollow, which was whether nofollow would waste PR. According to the official Google staff, let's say there are 10 links on a page.

Then the PR of the page will be divided into 10 copies and distributed to these links. If one of the links is nofollow, the corresponding PR will not be exported. I don’t know where the PR that should be exported to this link will go. Because according to the explanation, the PR that should be assigned to the nofollow link is not assigned to other links that are not nofollowed. Because of the different interpretations of the original article, there is controversy.

The above controversy is only directed at Google, and Baidu does not necessarily handle it in the Google way. In July 2010, Baidu search engineer LEE responded to Baidu's support for nofollow at Baidu Webmaster Club, but did not explain how to support nofollow. Is the link weight assigned to nofollow the same as Google? If it is really a waste, it is best not to use the links within the site. Why waste the weight on your own links within the site?

In the Baidu Webmaster Platform-High-end SEO Club Salon on the evening of October 26, 2012, the author asked LEE about Baidu's support for nofollow. LEE means that the weights that should be assigned to the nofollow link will be assigned to other links that are not nofollowed. So now using nofollow for in-site links may be a waste of PR on Google, and the flow of in-site link weights can be planned on Baidu.

There are two ways to use nofollow. One is to add nofollow attribute to the link:

a href=URL rel=nofollow

a href=URL rel=external nofollow

The first is a general writing method, which is intended to tell search engines not to track this link; the second is a more professional writing method, which is intended to tell search engines that this is an external link, which is not to track. Both of these writing methods are for the specified links, which can avoid exporting weights to these links and transferring the leftover weights to other links on the page. After the link is added nofollow, when the search engine discovers the link for the first time, it will still put it into the URL queue to be crawled, and it will also be crawled. However, the search engine will record the attribute description of the current web page, and the current page will not export the weight to the link.

Both of these ways of writing are telling all search engines not to track links on this page and not to pass weights on the links on the page. However, the first one is valid for all search engines, and the second one is valid for Baidu only. It can also be changed to the Spider name of other search engines. If the search engine supports this tag, it will have the same effect. If the page uses this tag, search engines will not discover and crawl the links on the page.

First of all, you can use nofollow links, which are links to pages that do not compete for rankings, such as registration, login, complaints, reports, etc. These links have no role in competing rankings, but the functional pages on the site can be processed nofollowed on their links across the site. As for the commonly mentioned contacts, we should depend on the situation. Some websites have brands and the contact information also have a high search volume. At this time, this page may have ranking value. It is best not to nofollow its links. It would be better if there is only one export link for another page in another page. If you consider it appears multiple times, you can start using the nofollow tag when it appears the second time.

In addition to the above pages that do not compete for rankings, nofollow can also be used to control the orientation of the weight within the site for competition. The Tuniu.com homepage uses nofollow for website links, and the dotted links are all nfollow links. Tuniu.com directs the weight of the homepage to the competitive ranking pages such as tourist destinations, regional strategies, and nofollows all the links to the travel group information, probably because almost few people search for tourist groups. Some friends may be puzzled. Since these contents are not weighted, is it not okay to directly use the JS or framework mentioned above to call them? You can also reduce the size of the web page. It should be noted that Tuniu.com just does not give weight to these tour groups’ information on the homepage. After using nofollow, Baidu can still find and crawl the pages pointed to by such links. If the content is good, it will still be indexed.

Tuniu.com's consideration should be to guide the weight of the homepage as much as possible to the pages of important competitive rankings, and not to double the interest rate for travel groups, but this information still needs to be included in Baidu. In addition, these travel group information can also enrich the content of the website's homepage, not like the noise links around the article page, so nofollow is used directly on the link, and no JS or framework calls are used. It should be noted here that even if the link is not lower than that, the search engine will crawl and include. This tag only suggests that the search engine does not pass weight to the current page of this link page, and cannot prohibit search engine crawl and include. At the same time, nofollow is just a suggestion on weights. Search engines may not necessarily fully comply with the webmaster's settings, but have a relatively complete set of algorithms to judge whether various links are meaningful. Whether the specific links still lead to weights will be calculated based on whether the link has recommended meaning. Search engines will refer to whether the link has nofollow, but will not just refer to whether the link has nofollow tag to determine whether the link will export weights. Search engines will not completely hand over the permissions of whether to export the weights to the webmaster, otherwise there will be chaos.

Continue with the use of nofollow above. Not only on the homepage of the website, but in any page section of the website, nofollow can assist webmasters and SEO personnel to better guide the flow of weights within the site, so that webmasters and SEO personnel can better optimize the internal link structure of the website. Now many large websites use nofollow, and off-site links exported from Baidu Experience Content Page, as well as links to other Baidu products in the top navigation of Baidu Knows. Therefore, webmasters and SEOs should also pay attention to this label.