nofollowmerkinnällä

nofollowmerkinnällä is a tag attribute used in HTML to indicate to search engine crawlers that a hyperlink should not be taken into account when calculating a website's search engine ranking. It is implemented by adding rel="nofollow" to an anchor tag. For example, a link would appear as <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">example.com</a>.

The primary purpose of nofollow is to combat spam, particularly in comment sections and forums where users might post links to their own websites to artificially inflate their search engine rankings. By using the nofollow attribute, website administrators can allow users to post links without rewarding those links with search engine authority.

Search engines like Google and Bing respect the nofollow directive and will not pass link equity or "PageRank" through these links. This means that while a user can still click on a nofollowed link and visit the linked page, the search engine will not count it as a vote of confidence for the destination website.

While initially introduced to combat comment spam, the nofollow attribute has also found use in other scenarios. For instance, it can be applied to paid links or affiliate links to signal to search engines that the link is promotional and not an editorial endorsement. This helps maintain the integrity of search engine results pages by distinguishing between organic and sponsored content. The concept of nofollow has evolved, with search engines sometimes treating it as a "hint" rather than a strict rule, meaning they may occasionally pass some link equity through nofollowed links.