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Please explain at the top of this page what "nofollow" means. This basic information is not explained anywhere in this page. Badagnani 22:29, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
- "nofollow" is a relation tag (rel="nofollow") which can be added to any link and is technically a request from the website to search engines to ignore the link. That's the technical meaning. What having such a tag means about your site etc. is subjective and various opinions are given below. --BozMo talk 23:50, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
- See also Meta Nofollow and Spam in blogs#rel="nofollow".
In response to widespread abuse of Google's PageRank formula using link spam, Google has implemented a special tag system which — for sites that automatically implement it — makes all links be counted nominally, rather than be ranked by excess propagation and proportion. This operates by changing the normal <a href="site"> tags with a "nofollow" marker (<a href="site" rel="nofollow">). Google note
This new nofollow tag has some hidden features which are more good than bad. Webmasters, those who run a website based on content (bloggers arn't webmasters plain and simple, dont misuse webmaster), can profit from using this nofollow in strengthening their own page rank. According to notes released in the beta of page rank, (source) PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn)). In this algorithm, one way links help more than Reciprocal_link. using nofollow then creats a one way link, giving your page rank an extra boost.
The possible implementation of this feature on Wikipedia was discussed at Stopping Link Spam / Comment Spam and Reduce link spamming: Support Google's "nofollow" approach. During the latter discussion, it was revealed that automatic addition of "rel=nofollow" to all external links had already been added to the Mediawiki software and enabled in Wikimedia projects. Another discussion ensued at m:Nofollow. From this informal poll, it appears that the majority of users desire control over the use of the feature.
According to Brion in #mediawiki, the development IRC channel, the use of "rel=nofollow" in links can now be controlled by setting "$wgNoFollowLinks = false;" in a Wiki's settings. In light of this, it is proposed that the use of nofollow be disabled for the English Wikipedia.
- As of March 6, 2005, use of rel="nofollow" is suspended for the time being on en.wikipedia.org. The vote is far from a consensus and discussion shows strong opposing positions with very wide differences in priorities which have not yet been resolved. More advanced heuristic use of rel="nofollow" is likely to come, when someone has the time to put in the effort to make it work. The blanket rel="nofollow" remains in effect on all other wikis for now.
- As of May 22, 2006, following this discussion, rel="nofollow" is now enabled on non-article pages (i.e. pages outside the main namespace) on the English Wikipedia, but remains disabled for links in articles. Brion has said that it is his "intention to enable nofollow everywhere in the long run (though this might end up being in more limited form, for instance allowing some whitelisting or other verification process)."
- As of January 20, 2007, Brion has re-enabled no-follow for the article namespace in the English Wikipedia, at the request of Jimbo Wales.
- Doing this despite 61% votes against it seems like a totalitarian decision to me :( --Kyknos 10:07, 1 March 2007 (UTC)