I wanted to put many hyperlinks in my content articles but wanted to reduce the outbound links count when a search engine spidered my web page content. 

The benefit of this comes from being able to build highly informative web pages without enduring the potential page rank leakage from the inclusion of external links.

After doing a little research around the Internet I have put together a summary of the findings below :-

Absolute Description

Rel=nofollow is a HTML attribute value used 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. It should be noted that not all search engines observe a nofollow attribute.

Rel nofollow problem

Google devised a new way to combat the spam problem in January 2005. The Rel=Nofollow attribute was originally designed to combat spam and to discount spam links that you have not posted on your site yourself and therefore cannot vouch for, such as in your guest book, or in your blog comments, or on your discussion forum.

Although engines that support the attribute are supposed to exclude links that use it from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary with each search engine.

• Google may take the "nofollow" attribute literally and will not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs may show conflicting results. Some studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already.
• Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
• MSN Search respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
• Ask.com ignores the attribute altogether.

Rel nofollow Solution

This is the solution I ended up with which seemed to satisfy my original aims. Now I can at least see all the links that have the rel="nofollow" attribute applied to them.

To highlight all your rel nofollow link tags the best to do this is via your css style sheet.

This is CSS code to add to the Style.css sheet:-

a[rel~=nofollow] {
border-bottom: dashed 2px #ffa500;
background: url('/../nofollow.gif') no-repeat center left;
padding-left: 17px;
}

The code is simple enough and needs to be placed in the style sheet somewhere. You can use a little image to highlight a nofollow link like this one...

The rel=nofollow link should look something like this in your web page:    MyWeblink for rel nofollow

The HTML code should look like this:-

< a href="http://www.google.co.uk/"
rel="nofollow">MyWeblink for rel  nofollow< /a >

Use Rel nofollow or not?

The nofollow attribute provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines not to follow a specific link or not to follow links on an entire page.

Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, which instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. For example:

You have to decide if you want to use this attribute or not. Some say that its a waste of time and that the search engines cannot make up their minds whether to use the attribute or not. It may not be worth the effort if there is no consistency in the way it is used by the search engines.