ARTICLES FOR WEBMASTERS 
 Protect Your PageRank Using Nofollow
By Lysis
You may have heard that Digg implemented "Nofollow" on the company's
user profile and comment pages. The same link attribute was added to
Wikipedia web pages in the beginning of 2009. For many webmasters,
placing links on web pages is just a typical part of development.
However, placing links to low quality websites can harm your PageRank.
For this reason, Google implemented the Nofollow attribute. Nofollow
allows webmasters to freely place links on web pages without losing
PageRank over poor quality target websites.
How Does Google Handle Nofollow?
When Google spiders a website, it finds the relevant content and
aggregates the links. For each link on a web page, Google evaluates the
PageRank of the current page and passes that value along to the target
website. For instance, if your website holds a PageRank value of 5,
Google uses your value to assess the PageRank of the target website.
For this reason, search engine optimization companies target websites
with high PageRank for spam and link exchanges. If a webmaster allows
too many low quality site links on his web pages, the webmaster's site
may have a decrease in PageRank.
This problem is remedied by implementing Nofollow on links. When a link
has the Nofollow property added to the code, it essentially tells
Google not to follow the link to the target site, and PageRank is not
passed. This allows webmasters to keep current links on pages without
damaging his own PageRank value.
How to Implement Nofollow
The Nofollow attribute code can be created dynamically or hardcoded.
The following is an example of a link that implements Nofollow:
<a href="the_other_domain.com" rel="nofollow">Target Domain</a>
Google recommends that the webmaster uses Nofollow in any link that is
not a reputable or trusted domain. For instance, Google recommends that
any blog comments that contain links should have the Nofollow property
implemented. Using this property creates a safety measure for PageRank,
and it discourages users from spamming blog comments.
Protect your PageRank using this method to avoid a reduction in the
website's Google index rank. PageRank is one of hundreds of factors for
Google's index rank calculation. However, this value can be easily
protected with just a few extra lines of code on web pages.
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