Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Linking to the enemy - a quick tip

We all know that the only hard currency on the 'net is traffic and links. Links make you more important, and allows your website to climb up the ranks on Google searches, thus increasing your traffic....

However, what do you do when you want to link to someone, but don't want to make the link an endorsement of the site? Well, luckily the larger search engines (google, yahoo, msn) allows you to use the rel="nofollow" attribute in anchor tags. This ensures that the search engines understand that while you link to the website, you don't want the link to be included in the websites ranking.

It's fairly easy to use this, simply write rel="nofollow" inside the anchor tag, e.g.
<a href="http://kriswager.blogspot.com rel="nofollow">Pro-science</a>

This allows the readers to go to the site, without you feeling guilty about linking to them.
Do remember that their site will still get an increase in traffic, and thus might increase their revenue, if it's traffic based (to avoid this, I recommend getting the Adblock extension to Mozilla, and simply blog their sitemeters and adfeeds, but that only works on the individual level).

I have no idea if Technorati respects rel="nofollow".

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home