If you are trying to do your own SEO just by link hunting please allow me to respectfully inform you that there is probably a flaw in your SEO strategy. If you need assistance ranking in search in a high competition niche feel free to contact us.

nofollow links

Are NoFollow Links Important for SEO?

Google spokespeople are on record clearly stating that NoFollow links do not pass PageRank (which is useless anyways). And, according to microformats.org, a NoFollow link is defined as “By adding rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines). Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.” In other words, most search engines use DoFollow links as a ranking factor, and not NoFollow. But….. The last time I checked SEO gurus do not have access to the algorithm.

5 Reasons why I believe NoFollow Links are Important for SEO:

  1. After creating awesome content for people that generates natural links the first thing I see in the backlink portfolio is a mixed bag of links- some are DoFollow, some are NoFollow. A natural backlink portfolio consists of BOTH. If you were designing the algorithm would you not place some sort of value on a NoFollow link?
  2. NoFollow has been poorly implemented. On the Microformats link above you can see plenty of examples where the NoFollow tag was correctly used, and where it has been incorrectly used even by large companies like Flickr and Twitter. They call this “bad examples” or “abuse”.
  3. NoFollow links show up in Google Webmaster Tools under “links to your site”. This does not mean they have value, but obviously they know about them (and they are keeping track of them.)
  4. Some people think just the mention of a website helps, or will help in the future in search engine algorithms. This makes sense to me. Search is still so young. I can’t even begin to imagine how search will work in the future: 5yrs from now, 500yrs from now. Your guess is as good as mine.
  5. Some NoFollow links could be more valuable than others. If you made the algorithm, you could always tweak it so that NoFollow links from certain sites such as social media platforms did (or did not) pass any sort of signal.

At the end of the day, I don’t care. I sincerely do not care if NoFollow links are good for SEO or not. My niche is content, and creating content. Any links are good links to me, and any natural backlink portfolio is going to have an assortment of links, including NoFollow links.

What do you think of NoFollow links?

Len
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On August 2, 2014   /   SEO News & Tips   /   1 Comment
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