Depending on the type of website you are running, you might be more or less familiar with how to manage nofollow links that appear within your content. Some websites just don’t have enough links to even bother with them. Generally speaking, though, we can’t really say that managing links is something that can be classified as an unimportant topic. A primary issue of link building which is for most business’ websites a primary means of raising traffic and increasing page rank are nofollow links. This is where the problem rears its ugly head. Google doesn’t take link building lightly, especially in PPL (Pay Per Link) situations, since it can be interpreted as unnatural search engine manipulation.
Nofollow as a weapon against spam
When this was first discovered, a lot of “SEO experts” started spamming the web. There were so many spammers that blog comments completely lost their purpose, because they were so over flooded by spam comments leading to different websites. All this was done in an attempt to boost their clients’ PageRank and earn a lot of money in the process. They went on such a spamming spree, that even Wikipedia was compromised and that’s when Google stepped in and introduced the “nofollow” link.
This is how it looks like:
<a href=”http://link” rel=”nofollow” > anchor text </a>
This piece of code tells Google bots that they shouldn’t consider links on a given page as links that are included as PageRank boosts. To put it simply, as far as Google is concerned, these links don’t exist in terms of PageRank. In terms of indexing, they are still there though.
Thanks to this option, linking pure spam lost its value and things started going back to normal. These days, WordPress has a default setting – all links to nofollow for all links submitted by users, to protect inexperienced users from getting spammed into oblivion.
Which nofollow links can cause problems?
There are a lot of different types of links that you should keep in nofollow, in order to avoid getting penalized by search engines. Link building manipulations reflect on both parties included in the deal. Both the website on which the link is located and the website to which it leads to get a thumbs-down from search engines. These nofollow links include paid links and websites that you don’t consider trustworthy.
This might not seem like a big deal for an average site owner, but in cases of blogs that get submissions from various different writers, this becomes a serious issue, especially when they want to keep a high PageRank. All of this depends on the blog’s policy on links. Some of them just don’t care and all links are do-follow links. In other cases, trusted authors may get a special benefit from keeping their links, while in other cases, the editors decide if the text is naturally linked and if it leads to a valid resource. Depending on their decision, your link might be set to be do-follow or nofollow.
Link building campaigns
Most people assume that nofollow links are worthless and that they only need do-follow links in their link building campaign. While nofollow links do not boost your PageRank, they still boost your traffic and having a link on a high traffic blog is miles away from being worthless. Even in cases when your links are not nofollow links, you can still be penalized if your campaign is overly aggressive.
I hope I managed to help you understand the importance of nofollow links and how to use them to protect your interest. Good luck with your web career and have fun!