: Is this tag real? rel="nofollow external" I can't seem to find any documentation that officially comments on this tag. Maybe a few forum posts here or there, but nothing on Webmaster Guidelines

@Ann8826881

external and nofollow are link (relation) types.

About link types

Link types can be given with the HTTP header Link or with the HTML attribute rel.

For HTML5, there are two sets of link types that can be used: those defined in the specification, and those registered in this Microformats wiki page (according to the spec).

In HTML 4.01, there is no restriction (all link types can be used). (See my answer on SO.)

The IANA hosts a list of link relation types. The relevant RFC is RFC 5988: Web Linking. See also the Wikipedia article Link relation.

About external

external was part of the HTML5 spec from 2006 to 2011, when it got removed. Reasons are discussed in the issue 'link type "external" either not useful or underspecified'.

But because it’s part of Microformat’s existing rel values , it’s still valid to use it in HTML5. This is the definition of external:


Indicates that the referenced document is not part of the same site as the current document.


On the Microformats wiki page for external, it says:


As of around 2006, this was the fifth and sixth most used rel value (sixth strictly being "external nofollow").


Several link types

You can use several link types in one rel attribute. They need to be separated by a whitespace. The meanings don’t "merge", each link type has a meaning on its own. So a link with rel="external nofollow" still has all the semantics of nofollow and external as if they were specified separately.

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@Berumen354

It's valid for XHTML where target="_blank" has been deprecated and something similar to the following JavaScript is being used to replace that function by observing the rel="external" entry and opening the link in a blank window.

function externalLinks() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
var anchor = anchors[i];
if (anchor.getAttribute("href")
&& anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external")
anchor.target = "_blank";
}
}
window.onload = externalLinks;

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@Sarah324

It basically tells the user agent that link should be nofollow'd and also points to an external website. Search engines will know not to pass link juice to the linked-to URL because of the nofollow value. The external value can be used for a variety of things. Often times it is used with JavaScript to automatically provide an icon that indicates the link will take the user away from the current website.

So, as far as SEO is concerned, it had no meaning, value, or effect. That link will not help your SEO efforts (but still will deliver traffic). It does protect the other website from incurring penalties from Google for selling links, though, which is probably why they did it.

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