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Revisiting the Many Faces of Nofollow
September 27, 2006
About a month ago, in my post about Del.icio.us cloaking its robots meta tags, I got into a great discussion about the relative functions of the "nofollow" robots meta tag vs. the "nofollow" link attribute.
Jason Dettbarn, in the comments, said
I know one is global and one is used for individual links. But end result, what is the difference? Both tell robots not to follow the links.The reason I bring this up, is because del.icio.us still has the "nofollow" link attribute on the individual links, regardless if your user agent is "normal" or Googlebot or whatever. So the link juice still doesn't pass, regardless of the meta tag.
to which I replied,
As for the nofollow meta tag and the nofollow link attribute having the same effect, that's not my understanding. As I understand it, the nofollow meta tag tells the bot to literally not crawl the target page, while the nofollow link attribute does NOT instruct the bot to avoid crawling the link, but instead, tells it to merely not pass link popularity (or PR, or however you want to think about it).So having a nofollow meta tag on a page does (or should) put a stop to indexing pages linked from that page, while having the nofollow link attribute enables indexing of links on the page but does not allow them to pass popularity.
Jason set me straight by pointing me to an earlier Cutts post that described the two as being similar in functionality. With that, I felt a little foolish, although it didn't negate the main point of my post, which remains that Del.icio.us is misleading its users.
Fast forward. I feel vindicated today, because while I still wasn't right (at least in terms of what Matt Cutts says, which I'll consider authoritative), I certainly wasn't the only one who believed that the two "nofollow" attributes have different purposes.
In an interview with John Battelle yesterday, Matt Cutts once again equated the attributes. This morning, Danny Sullivan asked for clarification, saying
Let's back up. You can put a meta robots tag on your pages with the value of "nofollow," as described here. This tag, about 10 years old now, long predates any concerns about link selling skewing search results or the nofollow attribute. It is supposed to tell a search engine not to follow any links on a page, for purposes of indexing those links....
Now on to the nofollow attribute. Created in January 2005, it was a way to flag particular links to search engines as those a site owner doesn't explicitly approve of. It was never defined as a means to telling search engines not to actually "follow" the link. It was more a way to say that you don't endorse the link. In fact, to my knowledge, Yahoo and perhaps others will still "click on" or follow links even if they make use of the nofollow attribute.
I doubt that Matt Cutts misunderstands Google's methodology in dealing with the two "nofollow" attributes, so I'm officially changing my beliefs on their usage. But I do feel better knowing that I'm not crazy, and that others (of significant influence and industry knowledge, no less) were lured into believing as I did.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 27, 2006 10:05 AM
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Comments
Matt's just made up his own definition for what the nofollow attribute is. You (and Danny) have the correct one, however!
Posted by: Jill at September 28, 2006 10:58 PM