What is A Nofollow Link?

After posting an article about dofollow links I received a few emails about dofollow/nofollow links? Because of this I have decided to post about what a nofollow link is and how it relates to the SEO/blogging industry.

I know a lot of bloggers, especially bloggers who use Wordpress, never think about or edit their blogs HTML code. However, to explain a nofollow link I will need to display some HTML code.

<herf=”http://www.daddydewberry.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Daddy Dew</a>

<herf=”http://www.daddydewberry.com/”>Daddy Dew</a>

From the above illustration, you can see that the top link has a nofollow attribute. The bottom link is a traditional link. Just for clarification, nofollow tag is different from the meta tag noindex which looks like <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>. This meta tag actually tells the search engines to not index the particular page.

According to the Google guidelines:

In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

In my experience, links that carry this tag will not pass link popularity, link anchor text (in my example “daddy dew”), and Google willnot index the page. While the link getting indexed is often debated, my conclusions seem to point to that the link is not  indexed. Interestingly enough, there does seem to be evidence that points otherwise, especially in Yahoo.

The main purpose of a nofollow links is to link to a site without reducing page rank or passing anchor text. In general, the nofollow tag is used on blog comments, paid advertising, and sporadically by some bloggers. While I don’t completely dislike the nofollow tag for paid advertising, it does not make sense on comment blogging and other links. This article best explains why the nofollow tag sucks. The author of this post wrote, “the nofollow tag is like reaching out to shake someone’s hand but then putting a glove on right before you do.” Here are few questions that I have for bloggers who use nofollow tags on comments and other links. Why are you linking to a site that you do not trust or want to help? If a commenter offers relevant content and advice to your blog, why not reward them with a little link juice? Is it possible that your site throws up a red flag when every link on your site has a nofollow tag?

What Does This Mean For Me?

It depends.

As a blogger, I recommend a few things. While I might try and blanket the blogging industry in the next few statements you will need to filter through what is best for your blog or website. Unless you are offering paid advertising (again, just depends), most of your links should not have a nofollow tag (I can see where this might change with a forum or some similar site). To me it seems to defeat the purpose of what linking is all about. Link to the sites that you think are relevant and leave it at that. If you are using a blogging platform that automatically adds the nofollow tag (Wordpress), consider removing it or at least base it on individual comments. With how rampant comment spam can be you will most likely need to manage comments individually anyway. For instance, maybe make one commentator’s link dofollow and allow the others to be nofollow. If an individual offers substance to your blog shouldn’t offer them a little reward? Lastly, I don’t feel any site should be build around the success of your PageRank.

As an a blog promoter/SEO/commenter, I would recommend being aware of what sites have the nofollow tag. You can do this by using Firefox and installing a SEO toolbar. I would still comment on blogs that have the nofollow tag. There are a lot more far reaching benefits to offering sound advice than just getting a little link juice. Keep reading blogs and keep commenting.

Best Practices For Nofollow Links

The entire article is linked above. Best practices according to Google:

Untrusted content: If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. ME: This is great advice. But at some point you might raise a red flag if all your links are nofollow. This probably does not apply to authority sites like Twitter and Wikipedia.
Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links. ME: Conflicting feelings so I am going to leave this one alone for now. At any rate, this is how Google feels.

I did add a short video offering a few extra points regarding nofollow links.

This is a widely debated topic and I would like to hear what other think about this topic.

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5. Buying Links: What’s The Big Deal?