SEO Step By Step Guide– 84. Understanding the No Follow Attribute

Google introduced the nofollow attribute in 2005 and those who are engaged in link building should take note of this attribute. If a website uses the “nofollow” attribute in its site for all the external link, then Google will not take that link will not have any credit in terms of boosting your website’s ranking. You might be spending a lot of time in building your links but without any avail as they may be blocking the search engines from taking those links into consideration for calculating your search ranking.

Popular websites like Wikipedia add nofollow tag for all the external link to protect their website from spammers who post rubbish in their website just for the sake of back links. There are number of blogs also do this to avoid spam comments. So if you have been spending time to comment in blogs, 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.

Different search engines respond to nofollow attribute differently. Google is the strictest of them all. It neither follows nor indexes the link that is with the nofollow attribute. Yahoo seems not to give any value to the links with nofollow attribute but they do follow the links and indexes them in their search engines. MSN too does not take into consideration links that are with nofollow attribute in their search engine ranking. Though search ranking does not improve with links that come with nofollow attribute, the traffic that comes through those links remain the same.

Nofollow attributes help your website as well. You can use the nofollow attribute in your site too. For example if you are promoting an affiliate link, then you can use nofollow attribute for those links because affiliate programs expect you to just send them targeted traffic and they pay you for the sale that your visitors make. So why to unnecessarily get you pagerank diluted by supplying back links to site that does not benefit you in anyway. Similarly, when you have space for banner ads, you can give them no follow attribute to them as well. You are being paid for the traffic that you send to them and not for boosting their pagerank. However, if you are paid specifically for placing the banner in a page with particular pagerank, then do not place nofollow tag because here your customer is expecting back links from a page with good PR to boost his or her website’s ranking as well.

Rather than making random link building efforts that places your website’s link in authority sites that do not allow the search engine bots to follow the links, make your link building efforts more fruitful by getting back links from sites that do not use no follow attribute.

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