Rel follow attribute gets universal approval
At the request of WhiteHat SEO community on April the 1st this year all major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN Live declared their joint support for a newly developed XFN standard.
The new attribute rel=follow is designed to complement the notorious rel=nofollow. However unlike nofollow attribute rel=follow is designed to express not negative but positive relationship between a linking website and a website rel=follow link points to.
I’ll try to explain it in layman’s terms - when using nofollow you instruct a Search Engine not to count this link in their Link Popularity calculations for Google it will be the well known Google PR index. If you put rel=follow on contrary you instruct a Search Engine algorithm to double the positive weight of your link.
To provide greater flexibility and more granular approach it is currently recommended to use follow value in quantity proportionate to the relative importance of a web site you point your link to.
Example 1:
rel="follow"
will simply double the weight of your link
Example 2:
rel="follow" rel="follow"
or alternatively
rel="follow follow"
(note that both versions of implementation are equally valid, note also that no commas needed for the second version) will increase the weight of a link 4 times 1×2x2=4
Let’s take a bit more complex instance
Example 3:
rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow" rel="follow"
or alternatively
rel="follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow follow"
here we have follw 10 times which gives the increase of ranking in 1×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2x2=1024 times compare to the ranking a link would normally pass.
It is also possible to use advanced CSS2 to provide a visual reflection of the quantitative weight of the rel=follow attribute in a way similar to how TagCloud visually reflects relative tag popularity.
The most inspiring of all thing is that according to the new specification to encourage a widspread uptake of the rel=follow standard all Search Engines confirmed the change in their algos that had been altered not to deduct the proportionate weight from the Link Popularity index of a page that uses rel=follow. In other words when you use rel=follow you will be able to pass as much PR as you wish without losing the PR of the page itself (PR Bleeding), at least no more than you would if you were using a normal link without any attributes. So at last WhiteHat SEO is rewarded with a wonderful standard capable of defeating the current link spam epidemic.
Ultimately, this new attribute provides us with extremely flexible tool capable of changing the nature of the internet relationships an enhancing the social network experience. Some sceptics however remarked that it might open yet another door for abuse.
tags: google, google pr, link popularity, msn, seo, whitehat, xfn, yahoo, rel follow, rel tag, white hat
Posted by LZZR under Blog | Comments (14)
