SEO or search engine optimization, is considered as one of the most successful form of internet marketing techniques used by webmasters. However, like other forms of internet marketing, SEO is also known for its malicious methods. Similar to email-marketing, spamming has been one of the many problems involving the use of SEO. This is method is known as "Spamdexing". Spamdexing involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

To counter spamdexing, search engines have used several ways to reduce the effect of spamdexing. One way that Google used is the "nofollow" tag. nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. According to SEO Philippines consultants, 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.

Concept The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005. The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Blog readers and bloggers were well aware of the immense problem. Just like any other type of spam affects its community, comment spam affected the entire blogging community, so in early 2005 Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger’s Jason Shellen designed the attribute to address the problem and the nofollow attribute was born. However, According to SEO Philippines consultants, the nofollow tag is only capable of rendering a link ineffective for Google, blogs and websites are still vulnerable to automated spamming softwares. Interpretation of the nofollow tag by other Search Engines Google have stated that engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, studies have revealed that Google does "follow", but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons. According to SEO Philippines consultants, Yahoo! does follow the tag, but excludes it from their ranking calculation. Bing respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not Bing follows the link. Ask.com, however, ignores the attribute altogether.

Margarette Mcbride