Recently updated: June 13th, 2019
While using a tool to do the SEO for my website, I received an error alert related to the no follow the link I had used. The tool highlighted the internal links that have nofollow attributes and warned me that using such attributes means that I don’t trust the link and hence, it will make Google suspicious.
This got me wondering how many people must be confused about nofollow links and its effect on their SEO. The fact is nofollow links DO NOT affect a site’s SEO, be it the giant Google, Bing or any other search engine. In fact, the warning I received is a major problem if you tend to use merely tools for your search engine optimization. You will receive false positives, creating doubt in your mind.
When blogging started flourishing, spammers would use the comments section to post ads to websites of poor quality. To fight this spam menace, rel=”nofollow” attribute was developed. It prevents search engine spiders from following those links. This unique attribute prevented spammers from watering down the trustworthiness and reliability of the host website.
As blogs became the in-thing, search engines too started experiencing the same issue as blogs. Paid links started playing a dominating role in page rankings and hence, search engines started asking website and blog admins to use nofollow links to minimize the effect of paid links on page rankings.
Today, it is possible to identify whether a page has nofollow or dofollow links. You can right-click a link and choose “Inspect Element”. Check the <a> tag to see if it contains the nofollow attribute (rel=”nofollow”).
Considering that search engines have permitted nofollow internal links, there is no reason to worry about their legitimacy.
In case you are avoiding nofollow links because of the negative impact on your SEO, here are some compelling reasons to convince you how these links actually have an SEO value.
1. Get Traffic to Your Website:
The main purpose of link building is to ensure your target audience find your website, browse it and then take the necessary action. When this happens, you can convert them into engaged visitors and from there into paying customers. If you keep this in mind, you should not really care at about rel attribute. As long as a person clicks the link and visits your website, it serves the purpose.
Remember, links can boost your website ranking and when you have a nofollow link, you can easily link it to dofollow link, especially if the original nofollow link is present on a site that receives a lot of footfalls.
What is the purpose of SEO? To build traffic and if a nofollow link can help increase traffic to your website, it definitely has SEO value and you shouldn’t worry about it.
2. Creating Link Juice Flow
Link juice is a common term in SEO and refers to the value offered by one webpage linking to another. So, if your website has a lot of backlinks from authoritative websites, you will enjoy high link juice compared to a site which has fewer backlinks.
In principal, if you have nofollow links, it means that there is no link juice filtering from authoritative and trustworthy sites. Hence, search engines will not look at nofollow attributes, thereby affecting your site’s ranking. If only search engine algorithms were so simple!
In reality, the algorithms take into account nofollow links when calculating the page ranking, especially if the links are on authority and reputable websites. You can benefit from the link juice by making sure that you generate ample traffic and ensure the nofollow links lead to other sites that link to your site.
3. Ensuring Google Views Your Site More Favorably
If you have just dofollow links to your website, Google will view it as a way to circumvent the system. Hence, it will penalize you by dropping your ranking. So, it is a good idea to have a mix of dofollow and nofollow backlinks. The search engine spiders will believe that you are doing to enjoy SEO benefits and will not penalize you by dropping your page ranking.
When you follow this method of SEO, the nofollow attributes work quietly to get you more clicks and views and this, in turn, has a positive effect on your website ranking.
4. Improving Your Website Authority
The metrics, like Alexa Rank, to measure your website’s potential do not have an impact on your website ranking, but listing services and directories find these metrics extremely important. They take into account the no follow links and other backlinks when trying to decide whether to do business with you or not.
So, if you have nofollow links, they help to boost your site’s authority and this helps to bring in more traffic and open up doors for new business opportunities. If your website has a high Alexa Rank, it works to your benefit as it is viewed favorably by advertisers.
It is also prudent to remember that the more traffic you get, the more people will see that your site is linked to authority sites. And, if your site and the authority sites provide quality content they will continue visiting and even share the URLs on social media.
You may wonder where nofollow attributes are used. Some of the places include the following:
a. Social Media: On social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, nofollow links are common. This is the main reason your profile does not get a boost on these sites if you have links in it.
b. Comments: As stated earlier, comments are often used by spammers and hence, all comments on forums, blogs, and news articles have nofollow backlinks.
c. Crowd-sourced and Open Content: Crowd-sourced and open content, like you get on Reddit, Quora and YouTube, have nofollow links and even the links in user profiles on these sites are the same.
d. Certain Publishers with No-so-Stringent Review System: Publishers, like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, LinkedIn Pulse, and Forbes, use nofollow attributes when it comes to their sponsored posts.
While it can be thrilling to get a dofollow backlink from an extremely popular website, chances are low that it will happen. So, you shouldn’t base your SEO strategy on it. Nofollow backlinks provide traffic and since it is a less-used technique, you should go for it. Remember, getting a nofollow backlink from a reputable site is more preferable than getting a dofollow link from a site with low domain authority. These links boost your site’s visibility and ensure you get organic traffic – isn’t that the purpose of SEO?
So, rather than getting worked up with your SEO tool for alerting you about the rel=”nofollow” attribute, invest in a good backlink monitoring tool that allows you to see how traffic and link juice you are getting from backlinks, including the ones categorized as nofollow links.
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