Most of the stumbling blocks above are ones you may have accidentally
put in the way of spiders. I’ll assume that you are all reasonably
familiar with HTML. If you have ever looked at the source code for an
HTML page, you probably noticed text like this wherever a hyperlink
appeared:
< href="www.ewaybiz.com/index.htm”>
When a web browser reads this, it knows that the text “SEO Chat”
should be hyperlinked to the web page www.ewaybiz.com. Incidentally,
“Eway Business Solution Tampa Florida this case is the “anchor
text” of the link. When a spider reads this text, it thinks, “Okay,
the page http://www.ewaybiz.com is relevant to the text on this page,
and very relevant to the term `Eway Business Solutions Tampa Florida.’”
Now what? The anchor text hasn’t changed, so the link will still
look the same when the web browser displays it. But a spider will think,
“Okay, not only is this page relevant to the term ` Eway Business
Solutions Tampa Florida,’ it is also relevant to the phrase `Website
Development Ecommerce Website’ And hey, there’s a relationship
between the page I’m crawling now and this hyperlink! It says
that this link doesn’t count as a ‘vote’ for the page
being linked to. Okay, so it won’t add to the page rank.”
That last point, about the link not counting as a vote for the page
being linked to, is what the rel="nofollow" tag does. This
tag evolved to address the problem of people submitting linked comments
to blogs that said things like "Visit my pharmaceuticals site!"
That kind of comment is an attempt by the commenter to raise his own
website's position in the search engine rankings. It's called comment
spam, by the way; most major search engines don't like comment spam
because it skews their results, making them less relevant. As you may
have guessed, then, the “nofollow” tag in the “rel”
attribute is specifically for search engines; it really isn't there
to be noticed by anyone else. Yahoo!, MSN, and Google recognize it,
but AskJeeves does not support nofollow; its crawler simply ignores
the nofollow tag.
In some cases, a link may be assigned to an image. The hyperlink would
then include the name of the image, and might include some alternate
text in an “alt” attribute, which can be helpful for voice-based
browsers used by the blind. It also helps spiders, because it gives
them another clue for what the page is about.
Hyperlinks may take other forms on the web, but by and large those forms
do not pass ranking or spidering value. In general, the closer a link
is to the classic <a href=”URL”>text</a>, the
easier it is for a spider to follow a link, and vice versa.