Advantages and Disadvantages of Nofollow Links

Since the day when Google announced that links play an important role in rank evaluation, link building became a major factor for every business owner. Everyone out there in the online market started to focus on more and more link building. However, many sites began to use link spamming in order to get high ranks in Google’s search results. But when Google came to know about this spamming it planned to take some actions. Apart from being strict with link spammers, Google introduced a new attribute called “Nofollow attribute”.

So, before discussing the advantages and disadvantages of this nofollow attribute, let us first know about what is it all about?

Read More: The Beginners Guide to Link Building

Nofollow Attribute

Few, years ago when Google found out that people were abusing links to get high ranks, it introduced the idea of Nofollow attribute. According to this attribute, any site can signal Google for not counting any particular link, during the evaluation of site’s inbound links.

Although, it was originally started for paid links where we have control over the inbound links. But, then google started penalizing the sites which had too many links pointing to them in an unnatural way, such an directory links, link exchange press release and guest posts etc. Before going deep into the discussion, we must not forget that links have been the basic building blocks which created the awareness among the people even before the Search Engines were introduced. However, now to find anything we first go to the search engine, so what I feel that Search Engines should give the liberty to those sites, which have a high user interaction and traffic rate to use any links they want to.

Whether to use Nofollow links or not?

Now, as we know about the nofollow attribute of Google, let us have a look over the advantages and disadvantages of using nofollow links. Moreover, we will also look at the impact of these nofollow links on the companies providing world’s best SEO services.

Nofollow links do not go through PageRank. Therefore, if a link is a nofollow link then it won’t pass PageRank ( Google’s measurement of link quality and quantity). That means, Google cannot penalize the site for linking to any low-quality site, if it has used the nofollow attribute. In addition to that, Google also cannot penalize any site for linking too much, if that site is using the nofollow attribute. This might seem as an advantage of using the nofollow link, but wait think before seeing the other side of it. On the other hand, if you are making use of nofollow linking then you must know that the link from your site holds no value to the others and also it is very unlikely that they include you in the announcements of new products and services, not until you have a very large base. For example, large sites like CNN and NFC makes use of nofollow links is all of the outbound links. It means that their links have zero value for PageRank, but still they are top ranked because of a huge user base.

Also know that…

However, it is quite important to know that even the nofollow links on the site are of use, the potential visitor may go visit the site and spread awareness about your site and product. This might look a little bit confusing, where to follow and nofollow the links. For your ease, we have enlisted few guidelines about where to unfollow the links:

• Always use nofollow linking in the comment sections or on forums because any content coming from the user side can be a spam. So, if you nofollow the links there it will help you in spam-fighting.

• Always use nofollow links for advertisements or for sponsorship management i.e. sponsored content, text and image advertising.

• Always use nofollow linking in press releases, the reason being is that those press releases have been used again and again and eventually they get abused. So, an a result mostly news sites have started to use nofollow for press releases.
  
  

• If you are using paid links or you charge for any kind of links like directory submission, reviews, quality assessment etc. you should nofollow the outbound links.

Read More: Why And When Nofollow Can Be Used For Links