"No Follow" Explanation

Hi All,

I'm no expert in SEO, but i have been around for a while and have learned a few valuable marketing lesions. As such , for what it's worth, i'd like to share my explanation of "NO FOLLOW" with you all.

Most people believe that "no follow" links are useless, right? this is not necessarily correct.

All no follow does is simply tells the search engine spiders that "hey, I can't guarantee the credibility of this link", so therefore do not pass my LINK JUICE on to this link.

However, it does not prevent the spider from following the link and indexing the content. Don't believe me? try it with a new site which doesn't have any links what so ever. Add a few links on yahoo answers and other popular sites which have no follow tag and I guarantee that your site will get crawled and indexed in a matter of few days.

Another reason to have "no follow" links is traffic. That's right! you may not get much credit from the spiders in terms of link juice, but real people will definitely notice a link of their interest in a well written comment or yahoo answer. After all the end goal of that link is to drive traffic to your site.

I hope this helps. good luck with link building.

 

Thanks for sharing your explanation about no follow links.

 

Thanks for the informative explanation. There is a lot of misleading information out there on the uselessness of "no follow" links and this clears that up and makes sense.

 

Good information!!

I also believe Yahoo and MSN don't look at the no-follow as heavily as Google, so sometimes even a no-follow link will do justice.

 

@SteveTaylor: That's a great explanation. And yes nofollow links are indeed 'followed' by crawlers.

 

I agree with you. Even though no-follow links do not parse link juice it still get index. We cant forget about huge traffic coming from some no-follow sites.

 

thank you for the explanation, but all those thing are well-known, ofcourse your link will be indexed from a nofollow link. Of-course the traffic is good, no matter of the link rel attributes , it's a pointless remark.

 

thank you, I understand now.

 

A link is a link. As previously said, if it is clickable, is is enough. The major effect of do-follow vs. no-follow is they help search engines (especially Google) build their index and create a ranking algorithm. A backlink (do-follow) is counted as a vote.

Although the post is about ppp articles and pagerank, it contains links to authoritative sources, therefore may be helpful:
experimentsincyberspace.blogspot.com/2009/04/paid-for-posts-ppp-and-google-pagerank.html

Sorry for the link is not live.