Nofollow links can be a great tactic in the SEO game, and can help you to draw visitors to your important pages in intelligent, tactical, profitable ways.
Nofollow tags are an important part of SEO, but most marketers haven’t heard of them, don’t know what they are or don’t know how to use. Smart Insights recently broke it down, with an analysis of what they are and how they can help you.
Here’s everything you need to know about nofollow tags.
So what is a nofollow tag?
A nofollow tag is a very basic piece of HTML code. If it’s appended to a hyperlink, it can change whether or not search engines can follow a link or not. If a nofollow tag is placed in the URL of a page, search engines won’t provide a link to visit the site, and won’t boost the ranking of the site based on the link.
Conversely, if no such tag is added, a search engine will typically be able to find the URL – and link to it.
Here’s an example. A typical URL looks like this:
<a href="http://www.smartinsights.com/" title="Smart Insights">Visit Smart Insights</a>
A URL with a nofollow tag looks like this:
<a href="http://www.smartinsights.com/" title="Smart Insights" rel="nofollow">Visit Smart Insights</a>
Search engines will find the first link. They won’t find the second link, even though both URLs both go to the exact same page. It’s all pretty simple.
Here’s what Google said about nofollow links:
“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links.”
It’s important to note here that other search engines may function in a slightly different way to Google, but generally speaking, a nofollow tag means much the same regardless of which search engine you use.
But how could these possibly support SEO?
In three ways:
- Paying for adverts and links to your site: if you use a nofollow tag, you can pay for links on sites that will deliver quality traffic. Meanwhile, you won’t run the risk of search engine penalties for buying links. Clever!
- Link to competitors: you can do so without supporting their SEO. Sneaky!
- Forcing indexing and crawl prioritisation of your site: you can use nofollow tags to make sure that search engines point to your important pages, not your less important ones, such as your sitemap and contact form. Tactical!
How else can nofollow tags affect my campaigns?
- Comments on blogs, forums and social media are already nofollowed… so you don’t need to consider these.
- Links in blog posts are NOT nofollowed. Guest posting can really boost your SEO.
Nofollow links can be a great tactic in the SEO game, and can help you to draw visitors to your important pages in intelligent, tactical, profitable ways.