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What are NoFollow Links?

If a link is given the attribute nofollow, then the search engine Google does not follow the link. This has direct consequences for the linkjuice. This option was introduced to give website operators the possibility to control the linkjuice even better. Nofollow links always belong to a natural link profile

  • This is used to mark non-editorial links
  • Was introduced by Google in 2005 as an anti-spam measure
  • Nofollow tag ensures that robots do not follow the link
  • Does not pass on Linkjuice to the linked page

What is the purpose of Nofollow Links

With the introduction of the Nofollow tag Google originally wanted to prevent that masses of links are set e.g. in blog comments and that these, sometimes automatically generated links have an influence on search engine rankings. In the past, it used to be possible without any problems to quickly gain advantages in search engine rankings even through a large number of links from websites with quite high Pagerank, i.e. also a high link power. Nofollow links are links to which the HTML tag rel = “nofollow” is applied. The nofollow tag instructs the search engines to ignore this link. Since nofollow links do not pass on the pagerank, they probably have no influence on search engine rankings. Nofollow and Dofollow Links – what is the difference? The only purely technical difference between the two is that a nofollow link has a nofollow tag. It is impossible for the user to tell the difference between a nofollow and a dofollow link. You can click, copy and use a nofollow link like any other link on the web. However, in search engine optimization there is a big difference between nofollow and dofollow links: Dofollow links help search engine rankings, but nofollow links do not. Instead of giving this attribute to only individual links, you can also use nofollow to mark all links within the header, for example to exclude follow links in forums.

The Nofollow Links take care of that

The Nofollow tag not only ensures that search robots do not follow this link, but also does not give the linked page any ranking advantages. Google and other search engines are known to use the links as an important ranking signal. However, they only count the dofollow links in their algorithm. According to Google, nofollow links do not pass on PageRank. Google therefore does not transfer any Pagerank or anchor text via such links. Essentially, the use of nofollow leads to the removal of target links from the “overall diagram of the web”. For this reason, one would like to receive dofollow links when building links, if possible. The nofollow tag introduced by Google was eventually adopted by the other search engines (such as Bing and Yahoo). Every link with the Nofollow Tag is technically also a Nofollow link. In general, incoming links from these sources are not “following”: blog comments of all kinds, social media (such as links in Facebook posts), all links in forum posts, certain news pages (e.g. the Art Huffington Post), links in press releases and links on popular sites such as YouTube, Twitch, Reddit or Quora etc. In addition, there is another important category of links that should be nofollow: paid links. According to Googles webmaster guidelines, all links that you pay for should be ignored. In fact, Google confirmed that the attribute nofollow link should be applied to all paid links. Because the search engine would like all links to be “earned”. For example, if you pay for an advertising banner on a website, the link in the Google banner should not be noticed. Otherwise you could be punished by Google. Nofollow links can help with SEO, because experiments and industry studies have shown that nofollow links can lead to higher rankings in Google. Nofollow links can also bring traffic, i.e. the right nofollow link can at least generate a lot of targeted traffic. There is also another important aspect that should be considered. The nofollow tag is also appropriate when linking to untrustworthy or less trustworthy content. Thus one does not take any responsibility for the contents, to which is referred from the own side

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