SEO And

If you’re adding a link to an external website in the content of your page and you don’t want to lose any of the link juice you have earned then you need to use the nofollow link attribute. As an example, you may want to add a blog post on your website on a particular subject but have a link in your page to reference another site, one way to do this is to add a nofollow to the link and your page will retain its authority.

When using a nofollow attribute you are saying that you do not vouch for the quality of the linked-to page. By doing this  you can to link to a web page without passing on any of the normal search engine benefits such as trust, anchor text, etc…

Why Use nofollow

Search engines introduced nofollow to combat comment spam. The idea was that the nofollow link attribute would not pass  link juice from the blog or forum site to the destination URLs found in the web user comments. Webmasters were able to automatically add the nofollow attribute to all external comments which would stop people leaving comments using bots. The intent was to discourage SEO black hats from utilising comment spam.

The basic idea is that links marked with the nofollow attribute will not pass any link juice to spammer sites. The format of these links is as follows:

<a href="http://www.dontpassjuice.com/" rel="nofollow">link text</a>

In the above example, the hypothetical website http://www.dontpassjuice.com would not receive any link juice from the referring page.

What happens when Google sees the nofollow link attribute?

When Google sees webmasters use the attribute (rel=“nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when they rank websites in their search results. This isn’t classed as a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to deter spammers leaving links on websites.

Which sites use the nofollow attribute?

You’ll find that a large range of publishers now use the nofollow tag to stop spammers taking advantage of their websites. Large websties including Twitter, Wikipedia, BBC, WordPress and the majority of social networking sites. Many web business directories use nofollow links too so if you’re thinking of paying for a link to your site from a directory site then you’ll need to check what type of link is being added. Nofollow links aren’t always a waste of time or money though, use your competitor research to see how many nofollow links your competitors have to see if you should have some too.

Further points on nofollow links

• You should use the nofollow attribute sparingly, and only in cases where it really makes sense. If you think a site is worth your “vote” then don’t use nofollow
• The specific link with the NoFollow attribute is disabled from passing link juice.
• No other aspects of how the search engines deal with the page have been altered.
• Google and other websites may still follow a “nofollow” link it’s just how they deal with it that is important

Remember: Your backlink profile will probably need a mixture of follow and no-follow links so that it appears to be mixed and natural. This is were competitor research comes in. If you need help building links to your website then enlisting the services of an experienced SEO Specialist can help get it right.