There have been a lot of discussion on the rel=”nofollow” tag recently. It seems that a lot of webmasters have taken to using these tags like nobody’s business. Nearly every single outgoing link has been tagged with “nofollow”. The reason is because a lot of webmasters are afraid that too many outgoing links will leak their PageRank and thus make their site less important. They are afraid that with less PageRank, they will lose out in Search Results rankings. As I said before, I am no fan of rumours and paranoia and if a lot of outbound links will make a site less important and leak PR, then Google (the Search Engine with tons and tons of links to other sites) will be the least important site on the Internet without any PageRank. Who can beat Google in indexing (and thus linking) the Internet?

Worse of all, some sites are suggesting to webmasters that one-way links are “toxic”. One way links are links that goes one way, without any linkage back. These sites suggest that 2-way links are better. So if a site reciprocate the link, then it would be healthy, but if not, they are suggesting webmasters to use rel=nofollow tag. Oh my god, you really can find all sort of nonsense and rubbish on the Internet. And these sites claim to be authority sites on Search Engine Optimization. Internet is all about links, and without links, we won’t be calling it INTERNET, won’t we? And if one-way links are toxic, then authority sites will never exist. Enemies of reason.

I think the rel=”nofollow” tag is good for stopping spam comments on blogs and other sites. That’s what it is meant for anyway. Google had known about the problem with blog comments and this is their solution. If a webmaster didn’t read the article, then I guess using the rel=”nofollow” tag on links for comments is reasonable. However, if a webmaster himself were to link to a site, then it should not have a rel=”nofollow” tag. If you write it, you should stand behind it.

And please, stop worrying about PageRank. It’s not very important anyway. I don’t mean to ditch link building completely, but you shouldn’t lose sleep over it. It’s a good gauge on the number of backlinks you have and it gives you a figure to “approximate” the “value” of your site. That’s about it. Write good content and do a decent amount of link building. Then be happy and drink some strong alcohol.