Kenneth Dreyer blog

Lately I’ve seen a lot of people in the forums and other places asking what the rel=”external” tag is? And does it carry any SEO effect?

People seem to confuse this tag with the rel=”nofollow” tag, which is meant for to not pass any Pagerank (or Google Juice) to the sites you link to. Well, let me start with saying that the rel=”external” tag has nothing to do with the rel=”nofollow” tag.

So what is rel=”external” then?

rel=”external” does nothing except notifying the browser to open the link in a new window (or tab). It does the very same as target=”_blank”, except that rel=”external” is xhtml valid while target=”_blank” is not. In conclusion, rel=”external” will pass Pagerank.

Tips:

If you want it to don’t pass any Pagerank, you could just use rel=”external nofollow”.