How do you create a text link with a "no follow" message so it is not crawled

[local-shoppers]

How do you create a text link with a "no follow" message so it is not crawled by search engine robots? If I link a website to mine and the link is crawled by a search engine robot, technically it is directed away from crawling my site and I believe this may hurt my page rankings. How can I make this link so that it is not crawled?

I do have a robots.txt file however I'm not sure what to input if this is how I fix this issue.

Thanks

[Vasili]

Re: How do you create a text link with a "no follow" message so it is not crawled

The bots do not function in that manner: they will register the link (both internal and external, inbound and outbound) and verify that it is a link to a valid website first --- this is the beginnings of establishing "relevancy" to your site. The cached version of the other site is immediately recognized by the bots along with the stored SE values, and this "comparison" helps to define the base valuations of relevancy between the two. It is not like the the bots are running down rails like a train and someone throws a switch to shift the tracks, and the bots leave your site! They stick around until they carefully evaluate your website in detail and merely "notice" the relationships you have created by your outbound links.

You cannot prevent bots from "following" links away from your site (it wouldn't make sense if you could), but there are times you prefer to "block" internal site pages from being cached or indexed, which is the reason for the "do not follow" file method.