An Ultimate guide to ‘Nofollow’ links
Link building is undeniably a critical part of SEO, whether it is linking to your site or another website, it’s hard to build a successful link building strategy. High-quality backlinks pointing to your website brings in more traffic not only from the users who click on those links but also through search engines. Search engines consider the quality of these backlinks to measure the value of your website. Therefore, you should make sure you have the right kind of backlinks and understand for which links you should be using the nofollow tag on your website.
Here is the ultimate guide which will explain how nofollow links help with SEO, why it is essential to add a nofollow tag to your links and when not to use them?
What are nofollow links?
Nofollow links are hyperlinks that use the rel=’nofollow’ inside the anchored element in the HTML tag pertaining to them. Tagging a nofollow attribute to a link on your site indicates that you are specifying search engines that you don’t want to give any authority from your page to the linked site.
It is a fact that Google believes nofollow links as backlinks for websites. Therefore, linking to unreliable websites could affect the site rankings in the search results. Hence, we use the nofollow link tag to define that the link doesn’t have to be considered as a vote by the Google search engine.
In 2005, the nofollow link option was introduced to block comment spam. It is usually used for links that you didn’t want to pass PageRank. According to Google, links with nofollow tags do not pass PageRank thus they do not directly impact your rankings in search engine results pages but can be a great source of traffic and increase your brand exposure when users click through the link to visit your website.
For example, A link from Facebook will not directly increase your page rankings but could boost traffic through referral visits.
Which links should you consider as nofollow?
Here’s an example of links from the following types of content that we set to nofollow :
- Social media
- Press releases
- Blog comments
- Low-quality directories.
- Sponsored or paid content
- Footers and template links.
- Auto-generated content
- Widgets
- Forum comments
Why should you use the nofollow link?
The nofollow attribute should be used for paid links, sponsored blog posts, text link ads, and other advertising links to make it clear to search engines like Google that they should not take any notice of that link. Also, any content that is considered untrusted should use the nofollow attribute for links.
How to use the nofollow link?
If you want to manually add a nofollow link attribute to links within the article, you need to modify the code. Go to your WordPress editor and switch to HTML post editor then click on ‘Text’ at the top right corner. Now find the link you want to make nofollow in the HTML post editor. Add a rel=’nofollow’ attribute.
You can check manually whether a link is nofollow or not by using a chrome extension that highlights nofollow links. In the Chrome browser, view the page source, search ‘a href’ and look for the links which contain the nofollow tag. To check nofollow links for a lot of pages use a plugin, the chrome extension will display all nofollow links in red.
Conclusion
Invest some time in understanding the basics of nofollow links and make sure you optimize your website’s backlinks properly. Remember that nofollow links can also boost your search traffic.
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Durga
About The Author…
Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.