Links are still important for SEO, but not all link types are equal. For example, ‘No follow’ links do not directly impact your SEO. Read the article to know about the Nofollow Link and when you should Nofollow a link.
What is a Nofollow Link
We should begin by defining what a Nofollow link is. An attribute rel=”nofollow” is associated with a nofollow link that links from one website to another. By using this HTML tag, search engines will ignore that link.
By ignoring the link, we mean that no link juice (or PageRank) will be passed between websites. Therefore, search engine rankings are not affected by Nofollow links because they do not pass PageRank.
Regular users do not understand nofollow links. It is still possible to link to a web page, but search engines do not follow the page when crawling and indexing.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow links: what’s the difference?
There are three significant differences between dofollow and nofollow links:
- There is no rel=nofollow attribute on DoFollow links
- Search engine crawlers ignore Nofollow links
- No link juice is passed to a website from Nofollow links, so they cannot affect its rankings.
When should you Nofollow a link?
It is your responsibility as an SEO professional to ensure the health of your site’s SEO.
You must ensure it complies with Google guidelines, including how you deal with incoming and outgoing links.
Link exchanges, paid posts with dofollow links, and selling links are prohibited.
You may also be penalized by Google if your website has a lot of outgoing links.
Generally, you should only link to trusted websites. To be safe, do not follow the link if you are not 100% sure about the quality and authority of the website you are linking to.
Is it a good idea to add Nofollow to internal links?
If your website contains internal links pointing to pages within your domain, then you shouldn’t use the nofollow tag.
Crawl prioritization is the only valid exception, but it rarely needs to be done. For example, to optimize your crawl budget, you can add the nofollow tag to any internal links pointing to pages that are not publicly available on the Internet (e.g., login pages or password-protected pages).
Nofollowed Links: What Are Their Benefits?
It is possible to rank higher with nofollow links even if you decide to treat them as hints instead of directives. Having no nofollow links on a site makes it appear odd and unnatural.
You can get much more traffic from nofollow links than from many followed links because they are suitable for traffic.
Final Words
To prevent search engines from following specific links, the nofollow attribute was created. Link juice and PageRank are not passed to the target website when links are nofollow.
However, any incoming nofollow link is not useless for SEO. It is possible to indirectly improve SEO by linking to high-authority websites.
A web admin should look after incoming links and ensure that all outgoing links to sites they do not trust are nofollow.
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