Nofollow link: what is it?
Recently I wrote an article about what online marketers can learn from PR when it comes to (creative) link building . They say practice what you preach , so I myself also started offering our knowledge and expertise in the field of online marketing in the form of guest blogs. But apparently I – as a newbie – had not yet covered everything in the field of link building in my article.
'Yes, we sometimes place a link under an article, but that is a nofollow .'
Oh.
Method by which webmasters can tell search engines not to follow links on a particular page or a specific link.
This makes it a secret thorn in the side of online PR and especially online marketers. Because – to put it very briefly – why would you put a lot of effort into getting online publicity if the backlink on the page hardly gives any value to your authority in search engines?
The nofollow link was already introduced by hotel email addresses Google in 2005. The search engine giant wants websites to build authority in a natural way with honestly earned links. When search engines crawl a website , they cannot easily recognize whether a link has been purchased. For that reason, Google wants you to place a nofollow link when it comes to commercial content.
A nofollow link prevents too much value from being attributed to the underlying page. This also means that you give away almost no value of your own page. Handy if you regularly post articles in which you sprinkle a lot of links for information.
By the way, to avoid a misunderstanding: placing a nofollow link does not harm the authority of the underlying page. It only prevents that page from receiving extra value and therefore its ranking from going up significantly. You are, as it were, removing part of the value of the backlink.
When do you use a nofollow link?
Actually it is quite simple: buying or selling links is not allowed. This falls under link exchange programs and with this you manipulate the natural building of authority. I quote:
This also applies to exchanging goods or services for links; or sending a "free" product in exchange for a review and a link to your site.