Microformats: rel=nofollow

Relnofollow is an elemental microformat, a part from the open standarts for microformats. When you add a rel=nofollow to any link, the page shows, that the link destination must not add any weight to this link. Typical example for using it is in the blog comments or a link, which the author wants to point, but not to add a weight to it. You an see VoteLinks - a way to add ( or not to add ) weight to a link.
The conception for the attribute is given from Google, but it was applied from Tehnorati and then it became a part from the microformats.

In the bulgarian blogosphere there are many tests for nofollow, there is entire separate blog called Gray hat seo, which exists a long time ago and it shows, that the nofollow attribute is not taken in mind. Here i think the number of the exbound links does matter, but not just links to interesting blog posts. The above nofollow tests has purpose to prove, that the rel=nofollow gives any value to the link. I've red what is written in Webmaster Guidelines about the rel=nofollow attribute:

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

We don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

And howsoever, the page can exists in the index, if it is linked through the Google Sitemap>

Here is an quote from the Official blog post:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Many things was changed, because Google is chasing a sites, which sells links. From selling links nobody is getting rich ( except Yahoo ). But the rules are these and we have to follow them :)
Here is an interesting blog, which is called - Nonofollow, and the subtitle is : Fight with spam, not blogs.

Here are some Bulgarian resources about Nofollow:

• All articles about Nofollow from Ognyan Mladenov


• Dzver's test and his Grey hat seo: The site got the first positions not only in the bulgarian, but in the english Google


• SEO experiment with Nofollow from Vasil Toshkov


• A test from Nullsoft and the site, which is a competitor in Turkish SEO competition


• Ivo Vasilev with his experiment ( the blog is very interesting, and there are a lot of SEO articles )

If you have other visions about the Nofollow, please feel free to comment.

 Manol Trendafilov, an seo and blogger.

P.S. This article is available in bulgarian language