Why rel nofollow

In the same article, Google later says that the new link attributes are hints that they can incorporate for ranking purposes. The main takeaway here is that Google can choose to use these link attributes for ranking purposes if it wishes to, specifically when it comes to evaluating the link containing the attribute, although they are not explicitly telling us whether they will or how. That said, Google has confirmed that the presence of these link attributes on the page will not be used as a ranking factor to evaluate the webpage or the website using the attributes.

Therefore, their use is entirely optional and won't serve to benefit your SEO strategy - at least for now. I would also always assume Google won't follow an outbound link with any of the previously mentioned link attributes, and that no benefit is ever going to be passed to the linked party. I'd assume that it's the opposite for an internal link but usually there's better ways to tell Google not to follow an internal link anyway, for example using your robots.

Google lets you use the new attributes in combination with the nofollow tag. You can use a space to separate the values, or a comma—either is fine. Run a quick check of internal and external links with ContentKing. See how it can help you with SEO. Although the nofollow link attribute is mostly used for outbound links, there are situations where it could help you with your internal structure too. For instance, the nofollow link attribute can prevent search engines from following links to filtered product pages.

The use of filters—and faceted navigation in particular—can generate an enormous amount of URLs with near-duplicate content. Applying the nofollow value to the links used on filter parameters is one way to prevent unnecessary crawling of these URLs.

In the example below, we are instructing search engines not to follow our color filter for socks. While the socks category of the website remains indexed, the nofollow link attribute prevents the search engine from crawling the filtered website that might have thousands of nearly identical variations.

And besides, Google's now treating the nofollow link attribute as a hint rather than a directive. About 10 years ago, adding the nofollow link attribute would result in no link authority being distributed to those linked pages, and instead, other linked pages with regular followed links would get more link authority.

This practice is called link sculpting. Google will treat the authority that would normally be passed on when linking without nofollow as lost. In other words, attempting link sculpting like this is more harmful than beneficial. With Google advising internal nofollow links draw pagerank away from the remaining internal links on the page, SEOs have had to look towards other methods to attempt PR sculpting.

Some of the popular methods for obfuscating links are by using scroll event, using onclick events and intentionally malforming the links to prevent discovery by Google. Martin Splitt mentioned a couple of examples opens in a new tab of what not to do if you want Google to find a link, which translates into ideas to consider when trying to hide them. Caveat: this can also impact accessibility, so you might unknowingly create user issues by trying some of these tactics.

The nofollow link attribute was designed to battle link spam, and Google is now using the attribute as a hint rather than a directive. This begs the question: "do nofollow links now benefit your SEO performance? In the cases where Google ignores the nofollow link attribute, the link will benefit your SEO performance.

Take for example links from strictly curated Wikipedia pages. Not to mention, many people copy sections or entire pages from Wikipedia and keep the links untouched. In recent years, we've seen many top-tier publishers take the decision to apply a blanket nofollow policy to all external links, which led to Google losing large parts of the link graph.

And let's not forget that the newer version of PageRank may be using opens in a new tab a set of trusted pages that act as seed sites. A quality earned link is a trust and authority signal, even when this is nofollow, as far as I'm concerned. Many people believe that link building only matters if you get a follow link. While quality follow links can be great for SEO, there are still clear benefits to getting nofollow links.

Here are just a few:. If you are not sure how nofollow is or is not being used on your site, the Semrush Site Audit tool will provide you with valuable information you need. Let's look at an example. Below you will see that this site has 10 internal links that use nofollow; this might not be a problem if you are linking to a login page, but in this case, it was links to their main blog page.

This is something to fix as are the broken internal links. I mentioned the Domain Analytics tool which includes our backlink checker above, but I wanted to point out that you can see and export all of your nofollow links, and also filter out the sponsored and UGC links as well to quickly see how your site is managing outgoing links.

What Are Nofollow Links? However, many eCommerce sites use it as a quick "fix" for faceted navigation. Stevie Howard MyMktingSense. Obviously, there are times when this isn't needed, but I like to try and cover my bases. Ryan Jones RyanJones. Blake Corrington BRCorrington. We have really seen most of the changes come from confirmed core algorithm updates.

Google can even punish websites that create these unnatural links. In order to avoid such cruel and unusual punishment, a webmaster will use the NoFollow tag to demonstrate to the Search Engines that you are not creating links in an attempt to manipulate Rankings. Basically, if the link is unnatural, such as a link where an advertiser pays to get on a site versus people finding a page and deciding on their own to link from their site, it needs the NoFollow tag.

The number of times this article was shared on Twitter. Share this article. Email Subscription Subscribe. Learn everything you need to know about nofollowed links in this guide. New to link building?

Check out our. What are nofollow links? The interpretation of nofollow varies somewhat between search engines. PageRank is a complex beast. People treat links as editorial votes. They link to something because it inspires passion in them. They want to share it with friends. Do nofollow links help with SEO? Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. This could be an indication that Google values some nofollowed links from strong pages more than followed links from weak pages.

How to audit your website for issues related to nofollow links. Hit search to generate a report, then sort by the CPC column from high to low.

This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. Example of issues related to nofollow internal links in Ahrefs Site Audit Learn how to set up your first crawl in Site Audit in this video :.

Article by Joshua Hardwick. Like what we do? Come work with us. Subscribe Join our weekly digest.