What Are Nofollow Links

Nofollow links are links that are given an attribute value in the HTML code that tells the search engines no to count these kind of links towards ranking a given site. The code looks like the following:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.seoblogtips.co.uk>SEO Blog Tips</a>

These kind of links were invented to try and fight blog spam comments. As webmasters and SEOs used to spam the hell out of blogs just to get links back to their site Google decided to make the nofollow to try and tackle this obstacle.

Each search engines has different rules for nofollow, some count the links, others only just follow the links to get to new pages/sites. Below is what the main search engines do:

• Google - follows nofollow links but simply does not pass on anchor text or page rank.
• Yahoo – follows nofollow links but simply does not pass on anchor text or page rank.
• Bing- follows nofollow links but simply does not pass on anchor text or page rank.
• Ask.com – does not use nofollow links at all.

How to Spot Dofollow/Nofollow Links?

There is a Firefox add-on that tells you which links use the attribute. You can download the attribute HERE. The add on works like the following:

Nofollow= Links are highlighted in red
Dofollow= Links are highlighted in blue

When you have the add-on installed, you can enabled it by right clicking and pressing “NoDofollow.” Have a look above to see the Nofollow highlighted in red and the Dofollow highlighted in blue.

Should I use Nofollow Links

You make think, just because the search engine do not count nofollow towards ranking then there is no point going these kind of links, but there are three main reasons why you may/must:

1. The main reason to not worry about nofollow is, if you are getting links for advertising. If you have links on websites that are just for click-throughs, then nofollow does not matter.
2. The other reason is, as Google looks for natural link building, not everyone that links to your site will use dofollow links and if you go out their and get tons of dofollow links then this does not look very natural does it? You need to mix the link building up and get some nofollows also.
3. The last reason is, just because the links do not pass page rank or anchor text, that does not mean the backlinks can not be used to get pages indexed by the search engines.