It is extremely important for bloggers to understand and utilize nofollow links. By using them properly, you can avoid being penalized by Google, which could have a negative effect of your website’s ranking in search engine results. In this post, I will explain what Nofollow links are, when you should use them, and how to create them.
What is a Nofollow Link
When posting links on your website, those links will essentially be follow or nofollow links. The nofollow tag is a unique attribute that you will add to some of your links in order to tell search engines not to follow or count those links.
When you add the nofollow tag to a link, you are in a sense telling Google, “Don’t pass along any of my good page rank or give any boost to the website that I linked to.”
Without the nofollow tag, the links you post on your site are automatically follow links, which tells search engines that you trust those sites and don’t mind passing them some of your page rank, or what some call, “link juice.”
When Should You Use NoFollow Links
If you are writing great content and linking to relevant websites, the majority of your links are most likely going to be follow. The following are certain times where you should be and/or are required to use nofollow links.
When Linking to Websites You Don’t Trust
When linking to sites that are sketchy, you want to make sure to add the nofollow tag. One thing you don’t want to do is increase the page ranking of bad sites. Using nofollow links will protect you and help you to sustain your good reputation with Google.
Now, I want to be clear that it is perfectly okay to use follow links for good sites. Don’t just make your links nofollow simply because you don’t want to share some of your page rank. It’s actually good SEO practice to have external links to multiple sites that produce relevant content.
If you link to fellow bloggers or others who are producing good content, be generous by giving them a follow link. Remember the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Affiliate Links and Sponsored Posts
As required by Google, You MUST use the nofollow tag for all paid links. This includes affiliate links as well as sponsored posts. The reason for this is thatGoogle wants to know when you are profiting from any links displayed on your website. Also, Google does not want you passing page rank to sites or brands that are paying you to post their links on your site.
You should inform any sponsors beforehand that the nofollow tag will be applied to any links included in sponsored posts. Not following this guideline can cause your website to rank low in search results, or even worse, you can be penalized by Google.
Comments
You should make the links in your comment section nofollow. Doing this will keep you from increasing the page rank of spammers who leave links in the comments. If you have WordPress, all links posted in your comments are automatically converted to nofollow.
How to Create a NoFollow Tag
Creating a nofollow link is really simple, but it does involve some HTML coding. In order to make a link nofollow, you will add the nofollow tag, which is written: Rel=”nofollow”
For example, if we wanted to write about Moo business cards, the HTML link in our post would normally be written like this:
<a href=”http://moo.com”>Moo</a>
If we are an affiliate for Moo, we would add the nofollow tag to the link, which would change it to:
<a href=”http://moo.com” rel=”nofollow”>Moo</a>
If you use WordPress, you would make the change in your post editor. Open the post and switch from Visual to Text view. Once you find the link, add the nofollow tag and then click update. For more help with this, watch my Youtube video below (make sure to watch in HD for better quality and fast forward to 2.09 to jump right into the tutorial).
I just have a question.
I have recently discovered the no follow links techniques. I have installed a plugin that automatically added no follow tag to all my outbound links.
I want to know that what if we don’t add any do follow external link on our site. Will my ranking decrase ?.
Is absolutely no dofollow external links on a blog harmfull for seo ?
Hi Hunain. No, I don’t believe making all of your links nofollow will hurt your SEO. However, it will not help to boost your SEO either. It is good SEO practice to link to relevant external sites.
Great info. It was really helpful! I’ll be using the nofollow technique now. Thanks again. 🙂
Thanks Monique! I’m glad it was helpful.
I wasn’t aware in previous posts, but since have included in all of my links and it has help tremendously with my rankings. Thanks for sharing #BLMGirl
Thanks Joanna! I’m glad this was helpful.
Hi! I am popping over from the FB group. I never realized I should no follow sketchy links – that’s a great tip! Thanks!!
Hi Julianne! Yes, you don’t want to boost the page ranking for sites you don’t trust. Glad this was helpful. Thanks you for visiting.
Wow! I had no idea about non-follow links, Thank you for schooling me and the video helped out a lot. Will pin for later use. #BLMgirl
Siobhan, I am so happy this tutorial was helpful. Thanks for visiting!
I had no idea about no follow links for affiliate links. Pinned this for future reference! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Thank you, Mar! Thank you for pinning.
Great advice, I had no clue about nofollow links! I will have to add these to my future blog posts!
Great Kasi! Thanks for visiting.
I did not know about the comments needing to be no-follow. I learned something new today. Thanks for the post.
Thanks Dee! I’m glad it was helpful.
You just educated me in the past 5 mins. Thanks for this valuable info. I am still trying to figure out the world of SEO.
Thanks for visiting Kim!
Great info. I hate dealing with this part of blogging, but it’s good info to know. #BLMGirl
Thanks, Simone. I’m glad it was helpful.
Do you know how to do nofollow links for self-hosted WordPress? I did not see that option when creating links in the editor? Is there a simple way without adding the Html to each link?
thanks.
Hi Mary. My site is also self-hosted and there is not an option in the dashboard to make it nofollow. There are a few plugins that you can install that will make your links nofollow. You will just have to a search for some good plugins. Just make sure to backup your site before installing any new plugins. You can also redirect the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file, however, that is more technical.