There are a lot of people who throw around these search engine optimization terms as if they know what they’re talking about. I’m going to try and break it down in layman’s terms so that you can talk intelligently about them to others.

Also, you might have heard people mention “dofollow” links. I just want to make you aware that no such link exists in the source code. It is only a term to describe the opposite of a “nofollow” link. Ok, let’s get started…

I’m sure you’re more than aware that “robots” crawl websites. This is how the big dogs such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing store or index your page in their database servers. There are a lot of other crawlers or spiders out there doing the same thing. They all act a little differently. Just know that “indexing” a page is nothing more than the search engine company adding it to their database.

The “nofollow” tag is used to disallow the page rank of linking site to affect your site. If you’re just getting your site off the ground, you probably wouldn’t want to “nofollow” any links in hopes to gain the page rank (PR) of the link. The robots don’t crawl what we humans see in the browser, but rather the source code behind the scenes. If you ever want to look at the “source” of a website, just right-click on the page and choose “view source code”.

Once you get into the source code, you will see a lot of stuff going on in there. For this topic, we are only concerned with the stuff between the “head” tags or on an anchor tag. Let’s start with the “head” tag.

In the “head” tag, you can apply the “noindex” and “nofollow” tag to the entire page like so:

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<meta name="robot" content="noindex,nofollow">

Doing this at the page level of your site is very dangerous to YOUR page. Once Google gets a “noindex” directive on a page/link, it will remove it from their servers. If you have a custom footer with links to your site, you are hurting all YOUR links! On the flip side, if you have a family photo album or private landing pages, this is a great idea to keep them private. Again, make sure you don’t have any links on the page that you WANT to be indexed. The “nofollow” attribute will not give any rank back to all the links on the page.

The other way to apply these attributes is in the link like so:

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<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">anchor text</a>

Just know that the “noindex” link can only be applied in the meta tag like in the first example. This second example is showing how to protect your page by not allow the specific link(s) to affect your rank. If you don’t use the “nofollow” attribute on links or pages, you will be passing your valuable rank to them. If they don’t reciprocate a link back to you, I would “nofollow” all links. Most blog sites will apply the “nofollow” attribute to all their comments.

Hope this helps in your quest to climb the ranks of SEO!