You might cringe a little when you hear the terms SEO and Nofollow together in a sentence. Nofollow links are detested In SEO because they don’t add any value to the SEO campaigns.
In fact, having no-follow links on your website means you have bad links that you don’t want search engines to know. It simply raises a red flag on your website’s health.
You might see using no-follow as an unfair practice. Fortunately, there is some hope of a resurgence of the no-follow link.
Read on what we have come up with. In this study, we will look into the ranking factors. We can assure you after this article, you will see no-follow links under different lights.
What Are Nofollow Links?
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Nofollow is the links that are protected by a tag so that search engines cannot follow. Or you can say that the no-follow tag tells search engines to ignore that link.
Because the no-follow link has never been a part of the ranking factor, it doesn’t impact the search engine rankings.
Whether a link is no-follow or not, you can easily check the links from third-party software. You can download the backlink monitoring tool from the Pirate Bay.
How Is No-follow Different Than Dofollow Link?
The difference between the Dofollow and Nofollow links is that the Nofollow link has a Nofollow tag. You can click both the link and open the links.
However, there is a massive difference when it comes down to SEO. That is, dofollow links are crawled and scanned by the search engines; no-follow links are simply ignored.
How To Check If A Link Is Nofollow?
While there are tools you can use to check the links, you can do the same without the help of any software tools. Here is how to check if a link is no-follow.
- Right-click on your browser and select the ‘view page source.
- An HTML page will open.
- Look for the link on the HTML page.
- If you can see rel=‘nofollow’ before a link, that link is no-follow. Otherwise, the link is dofollow.
How Does Nofollow Links Affect SEO?
Do Nofollow links offer any value?
Nofollow links were not some glorified attribute in SEO. Instead, it was a way for the marketers to ask Search Engines to avoid certain links. These links were mostly bad links that might adversely affect the website’s health.
Any link can be restricted from being crawled. Just add a ‘no-follow’ tag before the link, and it acts as protective armor to protect your website from sung shady links.
The source code of a no-follow link looks like the following –
- <a href=”http://www.xyz.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Text</a>
But do no-follow links really impact the ranking?
Google introduced the following feature in 2005 to help website owners fight spam. Google asked the users to add a no-follow tag while exchanging links. If you don’t, Google can penalize you for the link scheme.
That’s when the importance of Nofollow links was introduced in the market. Unfortunately, while it was introduced in 2005, Google never counted how many no-follow links your website has.
However, things have changed. Today, every business takes the digital platform to set up their shop. Search engines need more metrics to evaluate the website and rank only the most relevant website on the top pages.
This is where the importance of no-follow links can be understood. Today, search engines pay attention to no-follow links as closely as do-follow links. They use these metrics to mark a website with links that owners don’t want the crawlers to follow.
Nofollow Links As Ranking Signal
There was a time when no-follow links were ignored. Today, every link is considered. While it’s interesting to see that no-follow links do not directly affect SEO, it helps flicker the ranking.
