Nofollow Link

Wondering what is a nofollow link and how it works? Let’s check that out.

A nofollow link is a link with a URL that has a nofollow relationship tag.

An example of a nofollow link is:

<a href="https://www.google.com" rel="nofollow">Google</a>

Note the rel=nofollow tag. This tag makes any link nofollow or not-nofollow.

All nofollow links must come with rel="nofollow".

This will help google not to crawl them or not to pass any SEO value to that particular link. This nofollow attribute hints the google crawler not to follow the link.

A nofollow link is a type of link that doesn’t give anything in the page’s favor and doesn’t generally help a page’s placement in the search engine results.

Also see: Dofollow Link

Use of Nofollow Link

If you use nofollow link attributes in your links, online visitors can still find and click the target page, but Google doesn’t generally give that page any authority.

Experts would use no-follow links whenever they want to tell Google that they don’t want any link juice passed through the link.

In simpler terms, nofollow links can be helpful on your blog or website when you want online visitors to know about a particular link source without giving any link juice to the page or post you mentioned.

It’s a commensal relationship – one benefits, and the other is neither helped nor harmed.

When to use nofollow links?

The following scenarios can be apt for a no-follow link:

• Paid links: You should use a no-follow link if you are being paid for a link. Once Google catches you using a backlink for money, your entire domain can be unindexed. Your overall rank in search engine result pages can be negatively affected.
• Links to sponsored posts: When it comes to sponsored posts, nofollow links are also appropriate. Paid backlinks are punished by Google so make sure you avoid doing that.
• Links to suspicious web pages: When you use any website that breaches Google’s terms and conditions, you can be punished too. Links that you’re unsure of should use a no follow. If your website focuses on health and medicine, don’t follow links to sites which doesn’t have any connection to your website. When you do this, Google will be suspicious of your activities and might even decide to de-index the page.

Google introduced this nofollow attribute in 2005. Bloggers usually rank their websites by link-building through blog commenting. But after introducing this “nofollow” google is able to block such spam. 

When bloggers add rel=”nofollow” in their website for any specific link, google will not crawl those links. This might be some genuine sites without getting links, but still a good way to stay away from spammers.