XHTML target=_blank and rel="no follow"

[tryin_to_learn]

I just finished reading Kevin Yank's article on using JavaScript with XHTML strict to open new windows for external links. Excellent article, IMO. My question is that I'm also wanting to include a rel="no follow" to keep search engines from leaving my site when they get to those links. It looks like I just use both values with a space in between like:

rel="external no-follow"

Is that right? It validates but I don't know for sure if it's stopping the search engines. Does it matter which I put first?

[Kravvitz]

You want to keep search engines from leaving your site? Why? They'll leave your site one way or another just like a human visitor would. Nofollow is to keep your pages from boosting the page rank of the other pages you link to. It won't help your site be indexed better.

Yes it's a space delimited list, but there is no hyphen in nofollow.

rel="external nofollow"

[tryin_to_learn]

Thanks for the info. I thought nofollow could help prevent page rank leak -- no?

[ShayOUU]

As was just outlined -

http://www.seoconsultants.com/html/links/nofollow.asp

By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.

You can rarely truly control where robots go, but with robots.txt and things like rel=nofollow. You can control whats indexed on-site and what gets given weight from your domain.

[Kravvitz]

You're welcome

From what I've read, page rank does not leak.