Is a No-Follow Link Helpful?
Written by Pablo Palatnik on November 11, 2008
The subject of the good ol’ no-follow link keeps coming up and up again, especially to people who are just starting in SEO, optimize websites with link building strategies, etc. Let me start out y quickly answering the question with my opinion, YES. No-follow links are helpful. As I always like to say, a link is a link.
What is No-Follow?
nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.
Wiki also has a great explanation on why it was intended, “Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, some SEOs have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link should work just like nofollow used for external links.
Several SEOs have suggested that pages such as “About Us”, “Terms of Service”, “Contact Us”, and “Privacy Policy” pages are not important enough to earn PageRank, and so should have nofollow on internal links pointing to them. Google employee Matt Cutts has provided indirect responses on the subject, but has never publicly endorsed this point of view.”
That’s not to say that people who spam thousands of blogs with links about prescription drugs are really helping their optimization efforts and thats not effective nor should you do that, but people always ask if they should comment on blogs for links, but 99% of them are no-follow.
As any good SEO will tell you, leaving comments in blogs has the worth in the traffic you may drive from a visitor who values your opinion and will click on the link because you had something to say they liked.
So, no-follow will benefit you with traffic and yes, it will help your organic rankings via Yahoo and MSN.
If you’re a webmaster, Google suggest to use no-follow in the following:
Here are some cases in which you might want to consider using nofollow:
Untrusted content: If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.
Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”). More information on Google’s stance on paid links.
Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
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