Have you been wondering what nofollow backlinks are? Let’s say you are adding a link to your site, from your site to someone else’s, and you don’t want to carry any link juice or authority from your site in that link.
Perhaps the link it to the website of your competitor, and you’re trying to outrank them on Google. Maybe, you’re a little bit stingy with your backlinks.
Whatever the case, including a no follow backlink means that the link will not pass over any link juice.
In this article, I will explain to you exactly what nofollow links are, how they work, how to find them, and whether they help your SEO or not.
Table of Contents
What is a Nofollow Tag?
A nofollow tag essentially means rel equals no-follow. When a link is added, it includes a piece of HTML code. A nofollow tag essentially means rel=nofollow.
Rel=nofollow is an indicator for search engines to stop following that link.
To check if a backlink is a dofollow or nofollow, simply check the page’s HTML code and see if it has a nofollow tag.
Basically, this is a warning sign for search engines to pass no authority or link juice, and to stop following that link so that it doesn’t rank higher on Google.
Impact of Nofollow backlinks on SEO
Nofollow links aren’t actually that bad. They can help your SEO and grow your site, and I’m gonna explain how this works in three different ways.
Part of your backlink profile
Firstly, nofollow links are a very natural part of your backlink profile.
So, whenever you get links naturally added to your site, that you haven’t built yourself, you may get links from social media.
You might get links from Wikipedia. All these sorts of links are nofollow. But, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad for your backlink profile.
Inclusion in website
If you look at any website with high traffic, chances are they are going to have a lot of nofollow links and dofollow links. It’s gonna be a cocktail of both types in their backlink profile.
Therefore, if all of your links are dofollow, it doesn’t look natural and may seem suspicious. This is why nofollow links are still important when it comes to link building.
For instance, if you buy a paid link from a guest blog, you get sponsored posts or an advertorial.
Google recommends making sure that this is a rel equals nofollow tag so that it doesn’t pass any link juice from another site to yours just because you paid for it.
Referral Traffic
When it comes to nofollow links, if someone’s scrolling through a page and they see a link from another site to yours, chances are they may click on it.
Out of a hundred people who see that link, one of them might click on it and go to your site. Therefore, you will generate some referral traffic. Even if the nofollow tag is there, it’s not a wasted link.
There is some debate over whether nofollow links actually pass a little bit of page rank sometimes.
There have been some studies on this, but no official statements from Google on whether nofollow links actually pass authority.
So, there may be a little bit of page rank passed from one site to another when it comes to a nofollow link. However, no one really knows the answer, so it hasn’t been confirmed yet.
I wouldn’t rely on the studies that say nofollow links can actually make a difference when it comes to passing authority.
When creating a backlink profile, it’s important to get a healthy balance of no-follow and do-follow links to help grow your site.
Plus, if you get lots of brand name mentions, even with nofollow links, these will be all over the internet when people Google you. This means that it is still a good site.
Outreach for Dofollow
Even though the links are nofollow, when the website mentions your brand it helps to make people aware of your website, and will drive referral traffic.
Therefore, it’s not a total waste of time when it comes to nofollow link building. If you receive a nofollow link, you can do link building outreach to contact the webmaster, and simply ask them if they can remove the nofollow tag.
To do this you can go to ahrefs.com and check your backlink profile. Filter down to only nofollow links, and then choose the links that you need to be dofollow.
Contact the site’s webmaster and formally ask them to remove the nofollow tag. Some of them might accept, and it’s definitely worth it for your site.
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