Why nofollow

Sergey Grybniak is the founder of Clever-Solution. He has over ten years of experience in digital marketing and entrepreneurism.

SEJ » Link Building. However, one question remains: How much credit do nofollow links get? Followed vs. Search engines follow i. You can tell search engines not to follow a certain link is by using the nofollow attribute, a snippet of HTML code that looks like this: Advertisement.

Total sessions. Organic traffic. Referral traffic. Sergey Grybniak Founder at Opporty. Today, blog comments are the primary place for site designers and SEO teams to use nofollow links. The spammer receives no credit from an SEO perspective, and you get to protect your own link profile from the spam. If you pay for a link to your website from another website, you cannot count that link as organic traffic.

You should mark the link as a nofollow link, otherwise it seems as though you are paying to artificially inflate your organic link profile.

Google recently announced changes to this system that all site owners should know going into In , Google rolled out the nofollow tag in response to overwhelming blog comment spam across the internet. Site owners realized that including links to their sites in the comments sections of blogs and other websites boosted their SEO, so many unscrupulous companies started spamming comment sections with links to their own websites to artificially inflate their search engine rankings.

The nofollow tag exists to prevent this. Unwanted links can quickly and easily diminish your SEO results and slide your content further and further down the rankings. Nofollow links inherently bolster your domain authority, improve brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website. Image Credit: Google.

These tags intend to make link profile creation simpler, adding an easy method for site owners to tag sponsored links and links to UGC. It will be possible to use these tags in combination. This change may seem counterintuitive, but the logic behind it is for Google to have the ability to compile more accurate link profiles for larger websites. Due to the changes in tagging implemented in , many sites simply marked every link as nofollow to avoid potential penalties.

They gained nothing for their own SEO purposes, but it made large swathes of the link graph unusable for Google. Ultimately, the nofollow link tagging system is a great tool for managing your link profile, allowing you to have more control over the links that influence your link profile and search engine result rankings.

Nofollow link usage holds a great deal of potential for any site owner who wants to increase brand awareness, drive organic web traffic, and boost overall SEO success in the new year. Thank you a lot for the useful tips about nofollow links! Do you know if the links from websites like CitySearch and Websst are follow links and is there a method how to prove this? Best: George Hudson. He wrote :.

What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. He also suggested that this be considered for infographics, as well. Widgets and infographics are easy ways for sites to generate many links pointing at them. They can also be abused, in the sense that embeds might contain links to third-party sites or links that are not accurately describing the source content.

However, nofollow has generally been something that the outbound linking site decides to use, with the exception of those who are buying links for purposes other than improving rankings. They might request nofollow on those links to stay out of trouble.

This means that you should make sure that it does not violate any Google guidelines and the way you deal with either incoming or outgoing links is part of it. Also, having a lot of outgoing links on a webpage is not normal and Google might penalize you for doing so.

In general, you should link out to only websites that you trust. Example 1: You are writing an article on SEO and you want to link to a related study. Example 2: You are writing an article on SEO and you add a link to a download site for your users to download an app or Chrome extension. Finally as mentioned above, any links in comments or other user-generated areas should also be nofollow.

The only valid exception is for crawl prioritization but you rarely have to do this. If for example you have pages that are not publicly available on the Internet i. Of course, a better way would be to block access to those pages in your robots.

Google will still index the target page but it will not take into account the link value. As explained above, for ranking purposes you need SEO backlinks i.