What is nofollow?

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I am brand new to the affiliate marketing industry and I am trying to break in with a simple coupon site, which will soon debut. I read a short conversation on your blog about nofollow links, and I was wondering if you could explain it more in depth for me?

Rather than potentially give you some inaccurate information, I’ll reference the Wikipedia entry for nofollow:

nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

So, I guess in layman’s terms, nofollow is a notation (rel=”nofollow”) you put in your HTML code for a link, so that the site where you are linking doesn’t get any improved ranking in the search engines, because of the link.

Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow for more details on nofollow.