The nofollow tag is a consensual way (approved upon by major search engines and blog software developers) of embedding links or letting others post links on your website, often within blog comments, without you taking editorial responsibility for the landing page quality of the link.

Some misunderstand nofollow tag by believing that if, say Google bot, encounters one, it doesn’t follow the link to see where it’s pointing to. Others see in nofollow tagged links the way escape loosing PageRank.

Unfortunately for those guys, Google Changed How It Handles Nofollow, and apparently decided to let some link juice bypass the censorship.

This is inaccurate, because the search engine will follow the link but will not assign it with any authority or PageRank from your website, due to your attitude towards it – “I’m not recommending it” – manifested with the nofollow tag.

Here’s how a nofollow tag appears:

<a href=”http://www.targetdomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>

When and how to use the nofollow tag

If you’re practicing SEO on a thin affiliate website, limit the use of nofollow tags in content pages only. Trying to sculpt PageRank by diverting it to monetization parts of your site basically lets search engineers know your exclusive “make money online” intentions and this will get you penalized.

For legitimate, solid business websites that offer search engines with unique content is OK to use the tag more freely.

Focus on letting the link juice/authority flow solely between important pages of your site. From an SEO perspective, pages like about us, terms of services, don’t bring you any benefit.

Using nofollow tag on links to pages that don’t need to rank prevents the link juice passed between important pages from being diluted.

A more advantaged technique of using nofollow tag is to embed it on links that point to category pages. Doing this will:

1) prevent PageRank from being distributed upwards through the site and

2) narrow its focus towards pages that convert.

As with all smart methods,

there’s also a sneaky side of using the rel=”nofollow” – in reciprocal linking.

Basically if you nofollow tag a linking partner you’re left with a one way link that is more valuable for SEO. I don’t recommend the practice because can become detrimental for your brand, once exposed.

The other reason why I’m not practicing it has to do purely with SEO. A site with loads of unverified links doesn’t give search engines sufficient motives to rate it as a trusted resource for the web. This isn’t necessarily the case with article directories where some of the most reputable ones use the no follow attribute. Don’t filter them out of your article submission software checklist – a little diversity in your linking pattern doesn’t hurt.

Third, there seems to be some little-discussed SEO benefits that come with freely linking out. See this blog post on SEOmoz on why is beneficial to link out to other sites without nofollow tag.

If you are currently sell ads on your blog or static website make sure you have them nofollowed or if the client demands a dofollow link, integrate them within the page’s context because Google doesn’t like seeing followed ads.

Not the Google bot is the inquirer here but the search engineer, so take care your sold ads are well disguised within the topic. Keep it in mind for when you buy adds, also!

Of course there’s a more simple way of channeling PageRank to pages that are the big earners for your business and that is by systematically building links in these directions, and at the same time “neglecting” parts of your website that are less important or don’t convert as well.

This is perfectly doable and gives real ranking results but I suggest taking advantage of the nofollow tag concept in optimizing your site.

What’s you opinion on nofollowing links leaving your site? Do you approve them or rather find them kind of selfish?