SEO Report: What is No-Follow and Why Does It Matter?

The nofollow attribute, introduced by Google in 2005, is of huge importance – and those who are engaged in link building would do well to pay attention to this attribute. If a website uses the “nofollow” attribute in its site for their external links, then Google will not award any credit in the form of Page Rank to the recipient website. Any boosting of your website’s ranking comes from followed links which pass link juice. If you are spending a lot of time building your links but not seeing any increase in Page Rank, you may be working with sites which have blocked search engines from taking those links into consideration for calculating your search ranking.

The reason for this is abuse. Spammers used to get links in anywhere to point to their site, even if their site was rubbish. This is why popular websites like Wikipedia started adding a nofollow tag for all external links – to protect their website from spammers who posted  junk on the Wikepedia website just for the sake of back links. There are a large and ever increasing number of blogs which also do this to avoid spam comments.If you have been spending time commenting in blogs as part of your SEO strategy, you must know whether the nofollow tag has been enabled. You might as well spend your time on something else more productively rather than provide free content to websites and blogs thinking that you are getting your free back link.

Keep in mind that different search engines respond to the nofollow attribute differently. Google neither follows nor indexes the link that is tagged with the nofollow attribute. Yahoo won’t give any value to the links with nofollow attribute, but they do follow the links and index them in their search engines. MSN (Bing) also fails to take into consideration links that have the nofollow attribute in their search engine ranking. Although search ranking will not improve with links that come with nofollow attribute, the traffic that comes through those links remains the same, meaning nofollow links may still be worthwhile if you find ones that drive targeted traffic to your website.

Nofollow attributes can be used on and provide a useful purpose with your own website as well. You can use the nofollow attribute if you are promoting an affiliate link, since using a nofollow attribute is what the affiliate programs expect you todo; they merely want you to just send them targeted traffic and they pay you a fee for each purchase that your visitors make. You don’t have to dilute your own ‘link juice’ bysupplying back links to site that does not benefit you in anyway. Similarly, when you have space for banner ads, you can assign a no follow attribute to them as well, since, again, you are being paid for the traffic that you send to them and not for boosting the other website’s pagerank. NOTE: Being paid specifically for placing the banner in a page with particular pagerank without a nofollow tag is supplying paid links to a customer and means you are helping them with black hat tactics. If someone buys links from you expecting back links from a page with good PR to boost his or her website’s ranking as well, JUST SAY NO.