Rel="noindex in a guest post

[VinceWicks]

I'm guest posting on some sites and one of them placed my back link as follows:

mysite.com

I'm not sure what he's trying to achieve with the help of rel="noindex"? The first that jumps into my mind is that Google will index the post but skip my backlink. So, there's no sense in such a bakclink, ringht?

[TomRayner]

Hi Vince

Not sure what they're trying to achieve there.  That code will be ignored.  The "noindex" command is meant to be used within a tag, such as: .  It's not acknowledged (by Google anyway) as a directive in an <a> tag.</a>

<a>Would presume they're trying to use it in the same way you can use a rel="nofollow" tag, but this won't have the same effect.

Puts a little bit of doubt in my mind as to the integrity and quality of the site going forward, but that's probably a bit harsh.

In short, the link will be behaving just like a normal one would, at least for Google.

Hope this helps.</a>

[OlegKorneitchouk]

As such, I think the link will be followed normally (it would be as if someone added rel="banana" to the link).

[ChrisClayts]

It would appear to me that this is an error on their part and that it should in fact be "nofollow", as far as I am aware the "noindex" rule should only be applied to the tag.