Welcome to your guide on the best practices for search engine optimization (SEO). We will be covering the “nofollow” coding for links.
Create a good policy for dealing with spam comments on your website!
Combat comment spam with “nofollow”
When you allow public comments on your blog, you run the risk of people sharing spam comments with harmful or otherwise inappropriate links. Unfortunately, these links can affect your site’s reputation and link it unfairly with other sites.
To prevent this from happening, it is important to add rel=”nofollow” inside the link’s anchor tag. This will ensure that Google won’t connect the unwanted comment links to the reputation of your site.
Automatically add “nofollow” to comment columns and message boards
If you implement a blogging software package on your website, then chances are that nofollow is already in place for user comments. However, it is also possible to manually edit the sections of your site that allow user-generated comment. If you have a public forum, referrer listings page, guestbook, or other type of general comment section, you are open to abuse from spam links.
If your site contains multiple spam links in these user-generated sections, Google may consider their presence a reflection on your site, even though you aren’t responsible for their placement. Adding nofollow on the links, or using CAPTCHAs and moderating comments are all helpful Webmaster tips to prevent spam from hurting your online reputation.
About using “nofollow” for individual contents, whole pages, etc.
Another issue that occurs for bloggers is when you choose to write about a website that does not necessarily make your ‘approved’ list. For example, if you want to warn your users about another site but don’t want to link it to your reputation, you can apply a nofollow to the link. You can also apply a nofollow to your robots meta tag if you want to nofollow every link on the page. This is in the page’s HTML inside the <head> tag. If you need additional information about nofollow, the Webmaster Central Blog has helpful tips about the robots meta tag using the method <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”>.
Next, learn about SEO for mobile devices or click here to learn how you can make effective use of the robots.txt file or here for the introduction to SEO Best Practices.
-
If you are struggling with your SEO:
- Determining if you need to be on search engines
- Getting found on search engines
- Getting phone calls and emails leads from