Some people find the rel=‘external’ after a link sometimes and may wonder what it is. The rel=‘external’ is basically used to tell the link to open in a new window. Why this has become more common is because the target=”_blank” which is still used is not xhtml valid, whereas re=’external’ is.

One might ask then, Can it affect my pagerank or does it pass on pagerank. The answer to that is that it does follow the link and pagerank can be passed on even with this tag in place. It doesn’t have any effect as the nofollow tag would have on a site.

Thus if you see the tag rel=‘external’ in a link on your blog or another persons blog with your link, rest assured its not hurting anything.

What can hurt a person that has a website though is email blacklisting. Read the article on How to get off of email blacklists and find out why.