SEO Basics

What's the difference between rel=external nofollow and rel=nofollow?

Nofollow is a co-ordinated efforts from Google, yahoo , MSN to stop crawling links that are considered not trustworthy or spammy. Today many blogs, message boards, forums, news sites use nofollow tag to prevent spam in their comments or other areas of the blogs or forums. Now there is a new tag that is similiar to rel=nofollow that is rel=external nofollow, external nofollow works the same as nofollow tag but this tag opens links in a new window instead of the same window. If you want to try just add rel="external" it will open the link in a new window. it sort of works like target=_blank. Target blank opens all hypertext links in the new window and rel=external nofollow, blocks all link juice and opens the link in a new window.

So if you find a blog that uses this dont get too excited, links from these blogs dont count. Move on and better luck next time.

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Comment of Francis:
OK, but is there a difference between "rel='external nofollow'" and "rel='external'"? Do links with the latter count?
Added at: 2011-09-13 10:20

Comment of admin:
Hello Francis, you have raised an interesting question pertaining to the topic posted. rel=’external' is part of xhtml code to open link in a new window and requires java script to execute the action. you can also see in the Google support forum a level 10 member quotes about rel="external" "The rel="external" attribute signifies that the URL that is referenced in the href attribute isn't part of the same website It has no impact on whether or not Google will consider that link as part of their link graph" so you can be sure that links with the latter do count
Added at: 2011-09-14 09:53