What is a No Follow Link?
A no follow link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the SERPs. No follow links get no love. Theirs is a sad and lonely life.
A no follow link is created with the nofollow link HTML tag, which looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>
The nofollow tag is basically a notice sign for search engines saying “don’t count this.”
Isn’t that just mean and terrible? Why would anyone do such a thing? There’s a reason for the nofollow attribute, and boy is it a good one!
Table of Contents
A World Without No Follow = Spamalot
As we discussed earlier, the natural do follow form of links is used by Google to measure PageRank. More links means more link juice, which results in higher ranking website pages. In its unadulterated state, PageRank exists to see what pages are the most popular (and therefore, likely the best quality pages), and deliver those top pages to searchers.
As a webmaster, you might find yourself wondering when to use the no follow attribute and when to allow for do follow links. No follow links primarily belong in:
- Paid links (it wouldn’t be fair to buy link juice, now would it?)
- Comments
- Forums
- Anything involving what Google calls “untrusted content”
Some webmaster may disable the nofollow attribute as a reward for blog commenters who are contributing to the blogging community or online discussion, but that’s up to individual discretion.
What does ‘nofollow’ do, and why was it introduced?
Apart from its obvious purpose of opening a new page in your visitor’s browser, for the search engines a link has two or three functions:
- To ‘recommend’ the linked page
- To associate a link text, or anchor text, with the linked page
- To pass Google PageRank to the linked page.
