rel="nofollow" in img tags?

Question

Does it make sense to have a rel="nofollow" attribute in img tag?

Do search engines' crawlers use this attribute in some way for calculating PageRank score?

What is the practical sense for using it (if any)?

Solution 1

The rel attribute is only for a and link elements. The nofollow value is to keep a web crawler from following that link (which might have affected the linked page's ranking based on your own). It keeps spammers commenting on blog posts from gaining any page ranking from linking from the blog (or discussion forum, etc.). It doesn't make sense for img elements and furthermore an img with a rel attribute is invalid, which may lower your relevancy score by a search engine.

Solution 2

nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Comments

[eThan Hunt]

Get entire rel="nofollow" in-depth explanation through video and updates article for rel="nofollow" google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569

[Shumaela Rana]

You are sooo right! :D When I tried to validate an HTML code snippet with the W3C validator it says: there is no attribute "rel": You have used the attribute named above in your document, but the document type you are using does not support that attribute for this element. Can you pointing me to the W3C official reference saying that? Thanks.

[Mason]

The rel attribute is mentioned in w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.1.2. The list of attributes that are valid for an img element are at w3.org/TR/html40/struct/objects.html#h-13.2.

[Su']

(What's a GSEPR?) Can you provide an actual citation for what you're saying here? Given nofollow isn't even valid on img, it's more likely to simply be ignored, not cancel out the alt value(huh?)

[Sims Siniron]

i use {GSEPR} instead of Google Search Engine Page Result. ya, you are right that, nofollow isn't allow in img tag. i just tried to indicate that alt img tag are counted by googlebot, wheather a link tag with nofollow is ignored by it. So why someone won't use alt img tag to get better position in Google search ingine image result? basically i mistakenly write "img tag" instead of "a tag" :(

[DisgruntledGoat]

Actually it does make sense for images - if you allow images to be posted on your site (e.g. a forum) you may want to let search engines know that you are not responsible for those images. In the same way links increase PageRank, embedding images can also increase their ranking in image search.