A no follow link is an HTML attribute that is usually giving commands to search engines that the hyperlink is not to influence the ranking of the search engines index. A no follow link is designed to decrease the effectiveness of search engine spam and improve the overall quality of the search engines results.

This concept was designed by Google in 2005 in order to remove the spam that can possibly get through to the search results while searching with keywords in the search engines. This do not block the web content but avoid the data to be indexed by search engines.

A links intended page rank will not be affected nor would its content be blocked by hyperlinks that include the rel=?nofollow? attribute. Though the no follow attribute was designed and copyrighted by Google, its value is being used by several others including, Bing, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search.

The search engines are not following the link; they are supposed to only not index the link in their search engine databases. The link is still able to be clicked and the page will load, no content will be blocked it is just meant to reduce the indexing and spam that comes across in search results. Google for example, states that the no follow link is taken literally and the link will not be followed at all but in information done for SEO purposes it shows some conflict to this. It shows that Google does follow the link but doesn?t index it to the linked page. Yahoo will follow the link but doesn?t include it in any of its ranking calculations, while MSN Search treats the no follow link as not counting it or following it. Every search engine will have their own difference as to what they believe the no follow link should mean.

Major Weblogs as a routine of submitting links with no follow attribute. There will not be any options to change it as well. Some programs though gives trusted users the options to change. And others may allow the writer to submit the way they write it and later remove the unwanted links to be manually removed.

Using the no follow link, the unwanted contents can be avoided in the web. Most of the web owners have blogs or forum posting in order to increase the site ranking. Rankings can go down rapidly by an unpleasant or harmful post. The no follow link allows these posts but safeguards the webpage owner but excluding these posts to affect the ranking.

The no follow links is used as a machine readable disclosure for the links that have paid for the services by Google. Whether the No Follow link is safeguarding or hurting the web owners is still a dilemma and the owners are pondering over it as many pages are paying for links to be traded. The no follow link is constantly under contradiction by SEO and it totally depends on the web owner to allow or reject them in their site.

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing expert who provides world class Search Engine Optimization to website owners. For more information visit: http://www.seorankings.co.za