rel=’nofollow’

Over the last couple of days, the “Big Three” search engines have all announced that they’re going to start paying attention to a new attribute on <a> tags - rel='nofollow'.

This attribute will essentially state that the marked link is not necessarily approved by the owner of the page that it’s on, and it will not be followed by search engine bots, and it will not contribute to search engine results. Why is this good? Well, it should cut down on comment spam in blogs, for one thing. All that needs to happen is for the major blog service providers to give their support for automatically including the rel='nofollow' attribute in any links in comments, and guess what? They have! What this means for workingwith.me.uk is that soon I’ll be able to take out some of the HTML munging code from my comments pages, which is something I’ve been wanting to be able to do for a while.

Oh yes, and adding the rel='nofollow' attribute to your link tags will not stop your pages from validating.

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workingwith.me.uk is a resource for web developers created by Neil Crosby, a web developer who lives and works in London, England. More about the site.

Neil Crosby now blogs at The Code Train and also runs NeilCrosby.com, The Ten Word Review and Everything is Rubbish.