Nofollow Links 101
June 16th 2009 7:47 PM
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Ever since Google introduced nofollow links in 2005, they have been hotly debated in the SEO community. Their controversy seems to have grown each year, and with recent changes in Google’s algorithm the blogosphere is buzzing more than ever about them.
If you have a website and have a link building strategy (which you should), it is very important to know about the difference between dofollow and nofollow links. This post provides a solid overview of nofollow links, and some additional resources to learn more about them.
What Is Nofollow
Nofollow links are an important SEO concept in the field of link building. The quality, quantity, and relevance of links to your website are critical to achieve high search engine rankings.
The inbound links to your website, known as backlinks, determine its Google PageRank (PR). PR is a ranking system used by Google that reflects the popularity of your site. You want a high PR, which reflects a site that is viewed more favorably by search engines, and typically receives a higher search engine ranking.
All links by default are dofollow. Once the ‘rel=nofollow’ attribute is added to the html link code, it becomes a nofollow link. This means Google will not follow that link, restricting that link from passing ‘link juice’ or PR to your website.
This does not mean a nofollow link will not be indexed by Google or other search engines. It simply means that the link will provide a negligible impact on your PageRank compared to a dofollow link.
All links are dofollow by default, until the ‘rel=nofollow’ attributed is added to the html code. Here is how the code looks like for each type of link:
DOFOLLOW LINK
NOFOLLOW LINK
Nofollow VS Dofollow - Why Should You Care?
Your search engine rankings depend on the quality, quantity, and nature of backlinks to your website. Nofollow links are treated quite differently than dofollow links by search engines.
Nofollow links do not pass much ‘link juice’ to your website, impacting the rankings on search engines. Dofollow links are viewed much more favorably, so if you are link building concentrate your efforts on Dofollow links for a better return on your time invested. Search engines favor dofollow links more, and so should you.
Are Nofollow Links Useless?
Absolutely not! And for several reasons. Having too few nofollow links relative to dofollow links on your site MAY set off alarm bells for search engines, especially Google’s, as a sign that you are engaging in buying links. This is increasingly being penalized by Google, which looks for a ‘natural’ ratio of nofollow and dofollow links.
Furthermore, nofollow links are still an important source of web traffic. Remember, your website is there to help visitors first, not search engines. It doesn’t make sense not to value nofollow links. True, they won’t help your PageRank that much. But they do help web visitors find your site, and can lead to someone adding a dofollow link to your website on theirs.
So in conclusion, I view dofollow links as a direct source of PageRank, and nofollow links as an indirect source of PageRank. Don’t ignore nofollow links, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!
Nofollow Google Changes
Since nofollow was introduced, PageRank Sculpting has been used to control the flow of link juice within a website, and to external websites. This is based on the theory that by limiting link juice to less important links by adding a nofollow tag, the links you would like to rank higher get more of that juice.
SEOmoz has a great article discussing recent changes in Google’s PageRank algorithm which impacts how it treats nofollow and dofollow links. This has created quite a bit of debate on the internet.
I am personally considering making my comments section dofollow. Wordpress, the blog system I am using, makes all comment links nofollow in an effort to cut down spam. However, I personally believe if someone contributes a quality comment on my website, they deserve to have some kind of recognition, in the form of link juice.
Check out Are Blogs Doomed with Nofollow PageRank Sculpting Issue for some good insight on this issue.
Search engine algorithms are always changing, and you must adapt to those changes, so stay up to date by following as many quality SEO websites as you can.
How Do I Check If A Link is Nofollow?
There are two ways to determine if a link is nofollow or not: manually, or automatically.
This method involves viewing the page source the link is contained in. Navigate to the source code of the link, and check if it has the ‘rel=nofollow’ attribute, it is Nofollow. This method is useful if you are examining the odd link every now and then, but not for evaluating many links at a time.
When you are checking the nofollow attributes of many links at a time, the manual process can be very time consuming. Using extensions for your web browsers that highlight dofollow links in one color and nofollow links in another will help save you a lot of time.
I personally use the NoDoFollow Addon for Firefox to accomplish this, and it works beautifully. It highlights dofollow links in blue and nofollow links in red automatically. I recommend almost any mainstream browser besides Internet Explorer if you are serious about SEO and web development, and especially enjoy using Firefox.
What do you think of Nofollow and Dofollow and their impact on your website? Do they affect how you approach SEO and linkbuilding? Let’s get a discussion going on below.
