Jun 08,2010 Juno Ecommerce Ecommerce
SEO Myth Debunked – NoFollow Links May Still Add Value to SEO
If your SEO strategy does not include NoFollow links, you might need to rethink your strategy. You see, various SEO e-books caution online marketers about “NoFollow” links being useless to SEO. This is a myth that is being perpetuated by antiquated SEO e-books that misinform their readers.
This myth did have some solid basis before. Years ago, Google introduced the NoFollow tag to prevent blog spammers from getting backlinks when they comment on blogs. Wordpress followed suit by implementing the NoFollow tag on their comment links. This discourages people from spamming blogs with useless content.
The self-proclaimed SEO “gurus” then devised a way to go around this new Google rule. They advised millions of people to look for “DoFollow” blogs. According to these “gurus,” you can get precious backlinks from these blogs even if you don’t include useful content on your web sites.
Websites also used to add the NoFollow tag to funnel page rank from certain pages to their most important page. Now, Google discourages this practice and transformed how the NoFollow tag works.
Today, Google uses NoFollow tags to pass a fraction of a page rank through the link. It may also index the page that has been linked to even if only one NoFollow link is made. If you don’t believe us, look at how Twitter pages work.
Twitter is totally NoFollow tagged between profiles. However, when you have a million followers in your profile, you’ll see that your Twitter page will have an amazing Page Rank. For example, William Shatner’s Twitter account has about a quarter of a million followers and it has a page rank of 7. Stephen Fry and Barack Obama’s Twitter accounts which have 1.5 million followers and 4 million followers respectively both have a page rank of 8.
Rumours have it that Google can penalise you for having too many DoFollow links. Logically, if your site has great content, it will naturally gain a mixture of DoFollow and NoFollow links. What we’d like you to consider for your SEO strategy is to have a healthy mix of DoFollow and NoFollow links to satisfy the Google spiders.