Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?

[Jeepster]

I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML?

I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.

[STL]

It's a way of controlling the link power from a site. They're passing on the link juice to you.

If you want the search engines to see that link on the external blog, then what they have done is a good thing. They could have also just left that parameter out altogether.

People can put rel="nofollow". This means "don't pass link juice". You could interpret it as a directive to the world that whilst you are providing the link to the site, you don't endorse it.

From Google:

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

[SVmedia]

GoogleBot does obey the rel="nofollow" attribute.. as for rel="follow" - I don't think so.  The only other place I've seen that is in spam blog comments (as a desperate attempt to override the blog's default "no-follow")....

[Jeepster]

The only other place I've seen that is in spam blog comments (as a desperate attempt to override the blog's default "no-follow")....

Yep, that's what I've read as well.

Now he's changed it to rel="dofollow"  (no, me neither) -- which strikes me as even more gobbledegook.

Obviously I'm going to ask him to leave out the attribute altogether. But what other attributes should I be looking for on the page source (CTRL+U) to ensure he hasn't sneakily no-followed all the links on the page?

[irvingw]

test it to see if for some reason it is recognized, just for fun.

if something on a site is nofollowed by default and doesn't show up in the source code of that link (meaning it is declared in another piece of code), add a rel="follow" and a rel="dofollow" tag and see if it overrides the nofollow by using a firefox plugin tool that highlights nofollow links for you (you should already have this installed if you are an SEO)

[CMC-SD]

AFAIK, there is no way to "sneakily" no-follow a link. You no-follow a link by adding rel=nofollow. If rel=nofollow isn't there, the link is followed.

[Jeepster]

Hi Irvnig

Thanks for the response but the issue of adding tags doesn't apply as it's not my site.

[Jeepster]

Hi, what I meant was whether I should be looking for robot txt at the top of the page or somesuch

[irvingw]

I don't think so either, but you never know. Simple enough test to run to see if Google recognizes a "follow" or "dofollow" tag, simple enough test to run that's for sure. If it is hardcoded in the link code it will override any external nofollow tag.