Why use nofollow tags in links to merchant sites?

[lethal0r]

Tweet

i have noticed on affiliate sites that people have links to merchant sites with rel='nofollow' in the <a> tag, why is it linked in such a way?

[lowndsy]

It's generally used so that spiders (Google) don't follow the links and pass your PR and sites influence onto the merchant page, or associate the affiliate site with the merchant - everyone has different opinions on whether Google penalises us or not, but since there is not a lot of seo benefit in these links it doesn't hurt to hide them.
To be honest I'm not sure if it works - it'll stop the spider following the link, but if the spider is looking for affiliate links/code then it'll still spot it. A more complete solution is to use these nofollow links to link to a redirect script.

[Travel Pixel]

the most complete thing to do is to use nofollow, a redirect script and then block the redirect script in your robots.txt file.

bulletproof

[lethal0r]

i see, I would have thought that without the redirect script the nofollow tag would be entirely useless for this purpose - as you say the bot has to read the link anyway to find the nofollow.

by punish do you mean in terms of charging higher cpc on adwords, or also punished in the organic listings with a reduced rank for example?

[Shackattack]

Search engines tend to ignore these as back links, it's an old hat technique I think Google picked up on this a year or so ago.

[lowndsy]

by penalise I meant in the organic results. But noone knows for sure - all we can do is make educated guesses based on past experience.

[Brendon]

*sigh* Google et al have caused a LOT of confusion with the nofollow thing. It would have been better for everyone if they'd never bothered.

Nofollow does not (and never has) stopped a spider following a link. It was meant to be a mechanism to prevent PR / topical relevancy / trust flowing down a link, where you didn't want to vouch editorially for the target of the link, but wanted to link to them for navigational purposes.

It was originally marketed as a solution to blog spam (anyone noticed a reduction there yet?), by allowing blog owners to nofollow links in comments, thus rendering comment spam pointless...

Now it's supposed to be used for paid links, such as those in paid reviews, so you don't get a "spam linker" profile. Unfortunately, it doesn't damn well work. Implementation was never good enough, and usage was never widespread enough, and it's treatment by SEs was never consistent enough to make it a useful tool.

If anything, its harmed the WWW, as so many people have used it inappropriately, either accidentally or on purpose. Wikipedia just nofollowed EVERY external link they have, which is going to blow big holes in the web graph - nice one, Jimbo....

Ignore nofollow. Forget it exists. You can't do yourself any good with it, and you can conceivably do yourself harm

[Itchy]

nofollow dosent mean no follow google yahoo msn all follow any link with nofollow what it does is tells the se mainly google (since they introduced it
) not to let any page rank on that page transfer to the page its linking to

If you want proof create a new page on your site and then link to it from your site with the nofollow tag ..sit back for a few days and wait for the bots to arrive then check google for that page .... ta dar itll be there ...well ours always are ... rel=nofollow never stopped any of them by itself.

doh i see someones already said it .... must read all thread before i open me big gob

[ysc]

A good example for nofollow is on our travel site.

Advertisers add their own listings and can include a link to their site. If this links to a site that google deems to be part of a bad neighborhood, we can be deemed to have voted for the content of this site.

We could then be punished with reduced serps or even a ban.

To err on the side of caution we therefore place a no-follow on all user added urls.

Slightly different thing than you're asking, but I think a good example of what it was designed for.

[Kandevil]

Wikipedia just nofollowed EVERY external link they have, which is going to blow big holes in the web graph - nice one, Jimbo....

Didn't wikipedia have nofollows before and then took them off in Summer 05? Why can't they make their minds up

[Marc Gear]

It was originally marketed as a solution to blog spam (anyone noticed a reduction there yet?), by allowing blog owners to nofollow links in comments, thus rendering comment spam pointless...

There has been a clear reduction in blog spam for PR purposes since people started tagging links with nofollow.

Now blog spam is mostly restricted to spamming of affiliate links (mostly for vicodin, viagra, loans and penis enlargement) where the intention is to get traffic from the link, rather than page rank.

[Harry smith]

Using " no fallow " can be considered as black hat as it is against the concept of web, i mean the real meaning of the web ( inter-connection of sites )

[ysc]

The web still interlinks even with the use of nofollow. It's the search engines (google) that added the concept of 'voting' through links. Matt Cutts of Google has recently warned about linking to bad neighborhoods. This could mean linking to a site that then links to a bad site which is a nightmare to account for.

With regards to affiliate links, the vote (mostly) gets passed to affiliate networks, so no offense to the networks on here, but I don't believe that's the intention of the site owner.

[crazymarketer]

Here's my take on the 'nofollow' devil -
I manage a few merchant sites. These websites are promoted through affiliate marketing as well. When a page on the website is promoted by an affiliate or through banner ads or ppc - the url of the page gets modified due to insertion of tracking code. The spider considers this as a totally new page and crawls it - resulting in the same page getting crawled multiple times. You start getting the short term benefit of traffic, BUT, when the SE updates itself these pages are treated as duplicate pages (content duplication to be precise) - and your website ends up in supplemental results.

So I use nofollow on all URLs except the original URL pointing to a page on my website.

Well that's my observation - may be inappropriate - but works for me!

[Robs]

It was originally marketed as a solution to blog spam (anyone noticed a reduction there yet?), by allowing blog owners to nofollow links in comments, thus rendering comment spam pointless...

Hmmm, reduction, my ar*e.

Just as bad if not worse. Automated bots registering and posting to forums, blogs etc, its getting beyond a joke.