Should Sites with NoFollow Link Attribute be Avoided?
This is a common question for webmasters. What is the impact of nofollow link attributes to the sites linked to? What does it mean if a website has nofollow attributes?
By the way, nofollow link attribute should not be confused with the noindex, nofollow in the meta tags. They are different. Noindex, nofollow on meta tags tells robots not to index or to follow the page thus it will not appear in search results and it will not be indexed on the search engine. The meta tag looks like this: <meta name =”robots” content=”nofollow” /> . It is placed on the header before the </head> tag of the page. This is one way to hide your thank you page to protect your product from being stolen.
Nofollow link attribute on the other hand looks like this: <a href=”www.website.com” rel=”nofollow”>Click here</a>. According to Google, attribute instruct robots not to crawl a specific link. This was created to eliminate spam comments on blogs.
Here is how Google handles nofollow links:
“We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”
Now back to the main question, should we avoid or ignore sites with nofollow link attributes? For me the answer is NO. Even though Google does not really follow the link or does not give value to that link, other search engines handle this attribute differently. Take for example Yahoo. It follows the link even it has nofollow link attributes. I tried it myself. I checked a website on Yahoo Site Explorer and it counts links coming from Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers has a nofollow attribute. Other search engines may give less value to that link but they might not really ignore it.
One of the reasons why I would suggest that you put links from nofollow sites is to make linkbuilding natural. If you post to some authority sites such as Yahoo Answers, it can be of great help. Your site may not appear on the search results but the page on Yahoo Answers where your site is posted could appear on higher rank. This can bring more traffic to your site. You can set the linking from nofollow sites to 1/10. It means that if you create backlinks from ten websites, make one of them link from a nofollow yet an authority site.
Tags: nofollow, rel nofollow
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