real meaning of nofollow links [closed]

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i'm getting confused wh开发者_JAVA技巧at are realy nofollow attributes do. I do believe that they tell search engine spiders to do not follow the target. But my question is: do nofollow links alter the Pagerank?

Thanks

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ok, here is a simplified pipe google uses to serve your pages

• discovery
• crawling
• indexing
• ranking

discovery is basically the step to discovery new urls, common sources are

• links it finds on other pages
• sitemap.xml

adding a nofollow to a link on your page and google disocovers that links basically pushes the link into the google discovery queue, but with the flag "nofollow = do not crawl that site (based on this discovery), do not index this url (based on this discovery), do not rank this url (based on this discovery)"

so basically you have de-valued that specific link. the link does not count as a vote for that other page.

said that: it does not help you to save "pagerank" - the concept of pagerank is just thoughtcancer - the "link juice" does not stay on your page, it just get flushed into nirvana. congrats. it's like voting with a note not to count that vote.

there are only 2 use cases when a nofollow links makes sense

• if you can't (user generated content without editorial quality assurance)
• or if you won't (a link to a site you want to point out is sh*t)

vote for another page.

p.s.: this is the site for not programming related SEO questions https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/

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nofollow is poorly named. I'll try and give another explanation:

All the links on a web page acquire link juice that they can pass on to the pages they link to.

The amount of juice available to a page is based on the link juice it receives from other pages that link it. This all relates to the PageRank algorithm.

How the juice is distributed to the links is outside the question, and a Google secret. But each link gets a share.

nofollow in a link says don't pass on my share of link juice.

What is believed is that this link juice is just leaked out so using nofollow cannot be used to retain ranking. Just to deny the recipient of any boost in their ranking.

A good use for nofollow is when external users can add their own links in your website. This can protect you from people spamming you to pass on juice to their own websites.

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nofollow is indeed badly named. What it does is prevent the passing of PageRank and anchor text benefit to the receiving link. However, nofollow links can still be beneficial. Trust and authority can still be passed on, so a link from Wikipedia is still very valuable.

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Nofollow attribute means not to pass the PR with link..Nofollow links does not alter Page rank..but they can help in driving traffic towards to your site.. :)

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If you have links on your pages that link to external web sites, you can add nofollow so that your site does not "spill" page rank to the external pages that you link to (which they would if you don't add nofollow).