An Ultimate guide to ‘Nofollow’ links

by | Sep 14, 2021

Link building is undeniably a critical part of SEO, whether it is linking to your site or another website, it’s hard to build a successful link building strategy. High-quality backlinks pointing to your website brings in more traffic not only from the users who click on those links but also through search engines. Search engines consider the quality of these backlinks to measure the value of your website. Therefore, you should make sure you have the right kind of backlinks and understand for which links you should be using the nofollow tag on your website.

Here is the ultimate guide which will explain how nofollow links help with SEO, why it is essential to add a nofollow tag to your links and when not to use them?

What are nofollow links?

Nofollow links are hyperlinks that use the rel=’nofollow’ inside the anchored element in the HTML tag pertaining to them. Tagging a nofollow attribute to a link on your site indicates that you are specifying search engines that you don’t want to give any authority from your page to the linked site.

It is a fact that Google believes nofollow links as backlinks for websites. Therefore, linking to unreliable websites could affect the site rankings in the search results. Hence, we use the nofollow link tag to define that the link doesn’t have to be considered as a vote by the Google search engine.

In 2005, the nofollow link option was introduced to block comment spam. It is usually used for links that you didn’t want to pass PageRank. According to Google, links with nofollow tags do not pass PageRank thus they do not directly impact your rankings in search engine results pages but can be a great source of traffic and increase your brand exposure when users click through the link to visit your website.

For example, A link from Facebook will not directly increase your page rankings but could boost traffic through referral visits.

Which links should you consider as nofollow?

Here’s an example of links from the following types of content that we set to nofollow :

Links that should be considered as nofollow links

  • Social media
  • Press releases
  • Blog comments
  • Low-quality directories.
  • Sponsored or paid content
  • Footers and template links.
  • Auto-generated content
  • Widgets
  • Forum comments

Why should you use the nofollow link?

The nofollow attribute should be used for paid links, sponsored blog posts, text link ads, and other advertising links to make it clear to search engines like Google that they should not take any notice of that link. Also, any content that is considered untrusted should use the nofollow attribute for links.

How to use the nofollow link?

If you want to manually add a nofollow link attribute to links within the article, you need to modify the code. Go to your WordPress editor and switch to HTML post editor then click on ‘Text’ at the top right corner. Now find the link you want to make nofollow in the HTML post editor. Add a rel=’nofollow’ attribute.

You can check manually whether a link is nofollow or not by using a chrome extension that highlights nofollow links. In the Chrome browser, view the page source, search ‘a href’ and look for the links which contain the nofollow tag. To check nofollow links for a lot of pages use a plugin, the chrome extension will display all nofollow links in red.

Conclusion

Invest some time in understanding the basics of nofollow links and make sure you optimize your website’s backlinks properly. Remember that nofollow links can also boost your search traffic.

If you are concerned about your website’s SEO or rankings, check out our SEO Strategy and Services. Our leading digital marketing agency is a one-stop solution for your multiple problems. Contact us today to get a quote on our SEO Services.

Durga

Durga

About The Author…

Durga has a master’s degree in engineering. Technological advances in digital space interest her a lot. Digital marketing is her forte and she passionately follows latest trends in the digital marketing space. She has written many trending articles on various social media platforms. Her areas of interest include SEO Optimization, structured data, SMM, Keywords research and analysis etc. She is focused, resourceful and dedicated.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.

Cookies settings
Accept
Privacy & Cookie policy
Privacy & Cookies policy
Cookie name Active

Privacy Policy

What information do we collect?

We collect information from you when you register on our site or place an order. When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your: name, e-mail address or mailing address.

What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways: To personalize your experience (your information helps us to better respond to your individual needs) To improve our website (we continually strive to improve our website offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you) To improve customer service (your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs) To process transactions Your information, whether public or private, will not be sold, exchanged, transferred, or given to any other company for any reason whatsoever, without your consent, other than for the express purpose of delivering the purchased product or service requested. To administer a contest, promotion, survey or other site feature To send periodic emails The email address you provide for order processing, will only be used to send you information and updates pertaining to your order.

How do we protect your information?

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you place an order or enter, submit, or access your personal information. We offer the use of a secure server. All supplied sensitive/credit information is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and then encrypted into our Payment gateway providers database only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights to such systems, and are required to?keep the information confidential. After a transaction, your private information (credit cards, social security numbers, financials, etc.) will not be kept on file for more than 60 days.

Do we use cookies?

Yes (Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computers hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information We use cookies to help us remember and process the items in your shopping cart, understand and save your preferences for future visits, keep track of advertisements and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business. If you prefer, you can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can choose to turn off all cookies via your browser settings. Like most websites, if you turn your cookies off, some of our services may not function properly. However, you can still place orders by contacting customer service. Google Analytics We use Google Analytics on our sites for anonymous reporting of site usage and for advertising on the site. If you would like to opt-out of Google Analytics monitoring your behaviour on our sites please use this link (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/)

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

Registration

The minimum information we need to register you is your name, email address and a password. We will ask you more questions for different services, including sales promotions. Unless we say otherwise, you have to answer all the registration questions. We may also ask some other, voluntary questions during registration for certain services (for example, professional networks) so we can gain a clearer understanding of who you are. This also allows us to personalise services for you. To assist us in our marketing, in addition to the data that you provide to us if you register, we may also obtain data from trusted third parties to help us understand what you might be interested in. This ‘profiling’ information is produced from a variety of sources, including publicly available data (such as the electoral roll) or from sources such as surveys and polls where you have given your permission for your data to be shared. You can choose not to have such data shared with the Guardian from these sources by logging into your account and changing the settings in the privacy section. After you have registered, and with your permission, we may send you emails we think may interest you. Newsletters may be personalised based on what you have been reading on theguardian.com. At any time you can decide not to receive these emails and will be able to ‘unsubscribe’. Logging in using social networking credentials If you log-in to our sites using a Facebook log-in, you are granting permission to Facebook to share your user details with us. This will include your name, email address, date of birth and location which will then be used to form a Guardian identity. You can also use your picture from Facebook as part of your profile. This will also allow us and Facebook to share your, networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Facebook account settings. If you remove the Guardian app from your Facebook settings, we will no longer have access to this information. If you log-in to our sites using a Google log-in, you grant permission to Google to share your user details with us. This will include your name, email address, date of birth, sex and location which we will then use to form a Guardian identity. You may use your picture from Google as part of your profile. This also allows us to share your networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Google account settings. If you remove the Guardian from your Google settings, we will no longer have access to this information. If you log-in to our sites using a twitter log-in, we receive your avatar (the small picture that appears next to your tweets) and twitter username.

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Compliance

We are in compliance with the requirements of COPPA (Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act), we do not collect any information from anyone under 13 years of age. Our website, products and services are all directed to people who are at least 13 years old or older.

Updating your personal information

We offer a ‘My details’ page (also known as Dashboard), where you can update your personal information at any time, and change your marketing preferences. You can get to this page from most pages on the site – simply click on the ‘My details’ link at the top of the screen when you are signed in.

Online Privacy Policy Only

This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.

Your Consent

By using our site, you consent to our privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.
Save settings
Cookies settings