The no-follow link is used to give directions to search engines in order to exclude hyperlinks influencing the search engine optimization (SEO) rankings of search engines index. It helps in reducing the spam in the search engines results.

Google designed the idea of the no follow attribute value in 2005 to eliminate the spam that could come through in a seo search when using keywords in the search engines. The no follow link is not for blocking access to web content, only for preventing the content to be indexed by the search engines.

Hyperlinks that include the rel=”no follow” attribute will not influence the links target seo page rank. Although this was a Google design and is copyright owned by Google lots of search engines have began using the attribute value as well such as, Yahoo, Windows Live Search, and Bing.

It does not mean that the search engines do not follow the links. They do follow, but they merely not index them in the database. The link can be clicked, and the page will be loaded without blocking any contents. This is just used to reduce the spam being displayed in the search result. In Google search, it is taken exactly. The link will not even be followed. There are some disagreements to this in the SEO report. According to the report, Google follows the link but does not index it. Yahoo will follow the link but do not include in the ranking calculations. MSN search neither counts it nor follows it. Every search engine creates has their own difference of what a no follow link should mean.

Major Weblogs as a routine of submitting links with no follow attribute. There will not be any options to change it as well. Some programs though gives trusted users the options to change. And others may allow the writer to submit the way they write it and later remove the unwanted links to be manually removed.

Using the no follow link, the unwanted contents can be avoided in the web. Most of the web owners have blogs or forum posting in order to increase the site ranking. Rankings can go down rapidly by an unpleasant or harmful post. The no follow link allows these posts but safeguards the webpage owner but excluding these posts to affect the ranking.

The no follow links is used as a machine readable disclosure for the links that have paid for the services by Google. Whether the No Follow link is safeguarding or hurting the web owners is still a dilemma and the owners are pondering over it as many pages are paying for links to be traded. The no follow link is constantly under contradiction by SEO and it totally depends on the web owner to allow or reject them in their site.