Nofollow links have been around the corner for over a decade now. It has particular significance to SEO. If you wish to understand how SEO works, learning about nofollow links is particularly an important step ahead.
Nofollow links are particularly significant for your website’s performance. Let us now delve into a few aspects of nofollow links and how you can use them for your benefit.
What is a nofollow link?
The most important aspect of a nofollow link is that it does not affect your search engine results at all. The nofollow link comes with a tag like rel=”nofollow” in its HTML. Google does not even crawl through unfollowed links. The nofollow link suggests the search engine not to count this.
Then, why is it that we need such a thing, and why would “not counting” be reasonably any good? You see, there are no apparent distinctions between the two. That means if you touch a followed link and a nofollow link, you will not be able to understand the difference. However, the difference can be spotted only if you dive deeper into the pool of HTML codings.
Even though you can categorize every page of your website with a nofollow tag, however, we use them on certain pages while er use followed links on other pages. Let us now figure out why we do that by delving into the past.
To combat comment spams, Google introduced the nofollow tags. Google had a benevolent idea behind its launch back in 2005. Google said that there are many times spammers try to take advantage of “public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists”.
We would not obviously like it if spammers try to snatch website traffic away from you to their websites. This process of driving traffic away from someone’s website to their own is called comment spamming, and google knew how to tackle this issue. Thus, the being of ‘nofollow’ links discredited the functioning of these unwanted hyperlinks on your website posted by spammers.
Shortly, thereafter, other search engines like Yahoo and Bing joined this course to keep spammers at bay. However, you should understand that the interpretation of nofollow links may vary from one search engine to another.
WordPress, on their own initiative, has started to put a tag of “nofollow” on any link posted as a comment on your blogs. This aims to discredit all links, which leads to another external web page. Therefore, spammers will not be able to take undue advantage of your SEO performance and seep into your success.
Why should I invest my time and money on nofollow links?
- Diversification of all the links on your website
Pages with backlinks are naturally diverse. That is because some of the links are nofollow links, while others are followed links. No matter how much you try, some backlinks will always be availed by others through a nofollow link, and it is an unavoidable scenario.
Do not be disheartened because most of the traffic generated by various social media websites are nofollow links anyway. If you see any website with a substantially high level of “dofollow” links, you should know that there is some funny business going on there.
That is why it is always advisable that you remain somewhere between 60 to 70% of “dofollow” linkings and the rest nofollow links.
- Indirect web traffic
It is not always necessary that links are there for SEO purposes only. Nofollow links have the potential of driving traffic into your website. Nofollow links can often lead people to see what content you post and thereby promote you through their own content if they like your work. That can be a major catalyst for your website. Don’t you think?
- Google Penalty safeguard
Webmaster guidelines are pretty clear when it comes to “followed” paid links. All followed paid links are, therefore, against the guidelines of Google.
If you think Google will not be able to detect your paid follow links through their algorithm, then you should be aware of your competitors. They can easily report you for producing too many paid linkings. Moreover, one less competitor is one less to worry about for them.
Conclusion
Nofollow links can be a double-edged sword. If you do not use it for your own benefit, it will go against you. Since this is no child’s play, you should probably try out the best SEO Company Canada.
Moreover, this excellent affordable SEO Toronto can help you fetch reports as to whether your website has a healthy amount of backlinks. Connect with SEO Expert in Edmonton for a consultation through the entire process and help you stay safe against Google penalties.