When we talk SEO with our clients or potential clients, the topic of link-building will undoubtedly come up. And this conversation always gets into “what is a good link.”
There are plenty of other articles on what signifies a quality link (relevant website, high ranking pages, in-content links, etc.), but what a lot of people seem to throw in the mix is their disregard to attaining links on sites that place the “nofollow” tag on them.
If you are unfamiliar with nofollow, it’s basically a tag a webmaster can place on a link to direct a search engine away from following it.
This was originally designed for bloggers who wanted to control their comment spam from people/robots attempting to artificially increase inbound links to irrelevant, often illegible websites (think: Viagra and replica watches). The nofollow attribute eventually became a tool for SEOs to sculpt the link value flow on their own sites in an attempt to increase the value of each page while retaining the ability to link to other pages internally.
So, by placing a nofollow attribute on a link, you are keeping the “link juice” from spreading to other pages/sites. Being that inbound links have such a determining factor on your search engine rankings, it became something of a turnoff for link-builders.
But we don’t follow this same thought. If you think about it, links are supposed to provide more information on a topic, or point visitors to other sites that may be of use. If you set aside search engine rankings for a moment, and remember that the point is to increase traffic to your site, then there may be many sites out there from which a link would be of great value.
So don’t discount an opportunity to gain a link from a site simply because it would be “nofollowed.” Before Google came along and we realized how important links were to our rankings, this is how we gianed traffic anyway.
As long as the link is relevant and offers the searcher value in some way, we say get all the links you can. A qualified visitor from another website is just as important as that of a search engine.
I couldn’t agree more – everyone gets so hung up on the “nofollow debate”, that they end up wasting time they could have spent building links.
I am of the opinion that nofollow links certainly do influence ranking factors, even if only somewhat.
Thanks for the great share!
Agree. Links are omportant even if there’s a noFollow attribute. The point of having a lot of traffic is to spread your website to other site (Off-Page Optimization). With that, some visitors can also visit your site by any of your links.
I just read in a similar blog that they thought nofolllows were actually followed but after reading this, I’m not sure. Thanks for the information.