Benefits Of NoFollow Links

The original purpose of the nofollow tag was to limit spam. Apparently, Google underestimated just how dedicated spammers are, because it didn’t limit their attempts at all. The tag itself is consider to be a way to link to a site without providing them any link juice or between internal pages to keep the link juice from flowing to unneeded pages (ToS and the like). But many SEO’s and webmasters will tell you that nofollow links are completely useless when trying to build up your site, and the truth of the matter is, that’s completely false.

Wikipedia switched over to nofollow links sending webmasters into a tizzy. What they didn’t realize is that, while Google claims (and there is NO 100% evidence proving this) that they don’t crawl these links, other search engines do. Also, by having your link on an authority site such as Wikipedia, you’re more likely to gain traffic from those sites then some less valuable places that simply pass you page rank. Every link you place on the net is a chance for two things: traffic and more links. People still click through even if the spiders don’t and last time I checked, spiders didn’t write content for websites.

On an internal level, by utilizing nofollow links, you can redirect where you want your link juice to end up. Got a high PR page and want to pass some love to another notable page? Change all the links on that page to nofollow except the one you want to receive the link juice and you’ll be good to go.

It’s always a good idea to follow practices laid out by Google, but you need to remember that Google can change anything at any point, so don’t just focus on them and the hearsay that follows them.

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