Google supposedly follows the "nofollow" convention to keep from following links to other places. With that in your tag (e.g. a), Google and other search engines are not supposed to follow the links. I found out that's not working.

I was using the WP-Print plugin to produce an easy way to print posts. You clicked the "Print this post" link, and you get a nice-looking page free of other things you don't need, like the fat footer on the bottom of the page, or the other post meta data, like who wrote it (duh) or things of that nature. Just the stuff you need from the post, the post itself.

Life was going well, until I found out I was being punished by Google. If I didn't have the correct coding in the print tag, I'd be producing PageRank injuring duplicate posts. That's the reason the archive pages just use archives now, that evil Search Engine Optimization, the Holy Grail of linkinology.

Luckily, GaMerZ put in the "nofollow" attribute to make sure Google and other search engines would stay clear of the duplicates, right? Right? Right?

Look down the page, and you'll see the web addresses ending in .htmprint and .htmemail can only be reached by going through the rel="nofollow" links. This makes the code that GaMerZ put in there practically useless, SEO-ly speaking. He followed the rules, Google didn't, and who gets punished for it? Me.

Yeah, Google, might wanna check that "nofollow" thing out.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-11-18T21:01:43.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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  similarterms: google nofollow post print search page links things punished found gamerz engines posts duplicates stay clear attribute make luckily optimization