What NOFOLLOW Means for Your SEO Campaign

What NOFOLLOW Means for Your SEO Campaign

published by Dan in SEO with No Comments

The use of the nofollow attribute results in one or more the following consequences, depending on the search engine bot crawling the site:

1. the bot doesn’t follow the link at all;
2. the bot follows the link but doesn’t index it;
3. the bot doesn’t show the existence of a link at all;
4. the bot doesn’t show the link in its SERPs even just as anchor text; and
5. the search engine does not factor in that link for page rank calculation.

In terms of SEO, what this means is that…

1. If you are on a link building campaign you should make sure that the inbound links you get are not tagged with the no follow attribute. Note that all external links in Wikipedia, whether in articles, talk pages, user page, etc., are assigned the nofollow attribute. So if your SEO specialist tells you that spamming Wikipedia with links to your site is a good strategy then you can be sure that your SEO consultant has really outdated knowledge.

2. Comment spamming isn’t such a good idea. Many blogs now use the nofollow attribute in the comment section so that the sites that spam won’t benefit in terms of getting points from the links they litter around. However, note that while commenting wouldn’t always help your page rank there are still plenty of blogs that do not use the nofollow attribute on their comment section. Commenting (not comment spamming) is also good for building your social network, and while bots might not follow the links, interested readers will.

3. Since search engines differ with how they deal with the nofollow attribute you can still benefit from pages with even with your link tagged as nofollow though definitely not in Google nor MSN.

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