PageRank-hi-res-2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There’s been a fair bit of chatter in recent months about the value of nofollow links for SEO. It’s been claimed that when assessing a site’s backlink profile, Google takes into account nofollow links as a signal of naturalness. Whether that’s true or not, it’s useful for any SEO to understand the nature of nofollow links, and especially whether nofollow backlinks are really worth pursuing.
Nofollow Explained
On occasion, sites would rather that Google did not follow particular links or allow them to affect the target’s PageRank. There are various reasons, but one of the main reasons is to avoid spam. For example, a common SEO tactic for gaining backlinks was to put thousands of links into the comment sections of blogs and on forums. Many blogs now choose to have all links in comments marked “nofollow” as a way of discouraging such spam. Because nofollow links are ignored for PageRank purposes, spammers now have no incentive to put their links on these pages. Sites like Wikipedia have all their outgoing links marked nofollow for exactly this reason, it discourages people from using Wikipedia’s authority to get PageRank, as Matt Cutts discusses in the video below.
Are Nofollow links Useless For SEO?
Yes and no. Nofollow links do not pass on PageRank, so they’re not going to give you a bump in the rankings. Some SEOs say that a link from an authoritative domain is taken into account by Google, and an aura of authority is conveyed regardless, but there’s no real reason to think that this is the case.
But that doesn’t mean that nofollow links are completely worthless. Although backlink building is mostly about getting higher ranking in the SERPS, we shouldn’t forget that links are often a good thing in themselves. A nofollow link from a high profile site with lots of traffic is going to generate traffic for the linked site. Additionally, links engender links. A link on a high traffic site is more likely to be seen and linked to by other sites that have a dofollow policy.
All-in-all nofollow is a good thing for sites that want to build a presence by gradually building a strong, natural backlink profile while discouraging spammers.
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