Where to allow dofollow and nofollow links on your blog
Nofollow is an HTML attribute value which tells search engines to not follow a link. Search engines like Google use internal and external links to determine page ranks (or which pages are important and which are unimportant). Webmaster’s use the “nofollow” attribute to tell search engines that a link is not important. By telling search engines that a link is not worth following, webmaster’s can preserve the rankings of individual pages.
How to change the links on your blog to nofollow
There are a few different ways you can change the attribute of links on your blog or website. You can manually change each of the links by adding rel=“nofollow” in each of the <a> (link) tags. In WordPress, you can click on the HTML tab of your post editor and insert the “nofollow” attribute on each of the links manually. You can also click insert/edit link button in the post editor, then click the “Advanced” tab and then change the ”Relationship page to target” setting to “nofollow.” For WordPress blogs, you can also install a plugin which will automatically add the “nofollow” relation to the links you specify.
Where and why to use the nofollow attribute on your blog
One of the biggest mistakes bloggers make is to add the nofollow attribute to every link on the blog in an attempt to preserve the PR juice for every page on the blog. This is the absolute worst thing to do and it sprouts from a misunderstanding of how search engines rank pages.
Search engines like Google don’t penalize pages that pass of PR juice to other pages. As a matter of fact, it is quite possible that a page can be ranked better by linking to a site that is high in reputation and relevance. Google favors pages that ultimately provide a positive user experience; the best pages often provide users with relevant links to follow. Google will only penalize pages that link to irrelevant content.
In some cases, it is necessary to link to content that may seem irrelevant to search engines but is relevant to humans. An example would be the photo credit link at the bottom of this post. Humans understand why a site about blogging would link to a site about photography but search engine crawlers will not make the connection: hence why it is necessary to add the nofollow attribute to the photo credit link at the bottom of this post.
You should add the nofollow link attribute to links on your blog:
- In posts – when you deem the page linked to will be irrelevant to search engine robot crawlers.
- In comments – if you want to preserve the page rank value of your post pages by not allowing commenters to receive a link to their site which may, in many cases, be irrelevant to your site.
- In menus and navigation – If you have external links (in your blogroll for example) that point to sites much different in content than your site.
As a rule of thumb, you should NEVER use the nofollow attribute on internal links, which are links pointing to other pages on your site. Search engines value a site with an intricate web of internal links and adding the nofollow attribute to internal links will only destroy that web.
Photo credit: Stefan Van der Straeten
Does “nofollow” links works for seo? I often go to the forums with good reputation to leave my links, but it is nofollow.
i seen that nofollow still stealing link juice
Surely Google ‘should’ be smart enough to work out that a link for crediting a photo isn’t a link to irrelevant content.