RSS feedI have written about the importance of dofollow links in the past. I stated that if you leave a comment on a blog post you have to make sure it is a dofollow blog. In other words if the nofollow tag is added to the link in your comment the link does not count for you.
Lately I have been thinking more and more about my own statement. I am no longer convinced that this is an accurate statement. What made me wonder was a recent check of my website, using backlinkwatch.com. This site is great to check your competition for backlinks, but it is also a great tool to check on your own backlinks. Here is a snap shot of what I found:
As you can see yourself, 2 of the 4 backlinks shown in this picture are nofollow links. Yet, they are part of my list of backlinks according to backlinkwatch.com. So, it is hard to continue to claim that nofollow links don’t count, isn’t it.
I dug a little deeper to find out how exactly to tread a nofollow tag. It turns out that Wikipedia has a great article, that was very helpful for me. Here is how the Wiki page starts:
“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.”
In other words, links that contain a nofollow tag, will not pass page rank. Your page rank will not be impacted by the page rank of the page the nofollow link is on. But does that mean that a nofollow link is useless? Here is an image that I copied from the same Wiki:
First of all, it is clear that not all search engines treat links the same way. Most of them will actually follow the link, regardless of the nofollow attribute. This is counter intuitive. Why call it nofollow if you follow anyway?
Google will not index a page based on a nofollow link, but will index the page if there is a dofollow link to the same page as well. The other search engines will index any page they stumble upon, regardless of the type of link. Not only will it follow links, but it will list the page for the anchor text of the nofollow link, as long as the page is indexed.
What this means is that you need to find a dofollow link to get a page found and indexed by the search engines, but once a page is indexed the nofollow link will be used to list a page for the anchor text of the link.
For example, a link on the domain http://timedtweeter.com that looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.automarker.net/” rel=”nofollow”>social bookmarking</a>
will not result in a change in page rank for automarker.net, but it will receive visits from the search engines. The search engines will show automarker.net in the listings for the anchor text “social bookmarking”, since this page is already indexed.
It goes without saying that the search engines have no impact on who clicks on the link. If your link is on a high traffic, relevant blog, you can get a lot of visitors to your site, simply through clicks thru’s.
This is why I am changing my approach regarding nofollow links. I still believe that it is safer to go for dofollow links, but I no longer regard nofollow links useless. What do you think? Am I right in changing my mind on nofollow links, or do you believe that my previous approach was better. Both options seem to have proponents online. Which camp do you belong to? Share your opinions in the comments. They are much appreciated and help all of us become better marketers.
