The Great DoFollow/NoFollow Debate

Posted by David on Jan 7, 2009 in Search Engines | 0 comments

First things first this blog is dofollow aka not nofollow, so all links will be followed by the search engines.

What is nofollow? nofollow is a little piece of code included on tons of sites and blogs that basically tells the search engines not to follow your link.  It looks something like this rel=”nofollow” .   It was created to cut back on spammed links.  Each search engine handles nofollow differently, the main thing is google doesn’t index nofollow links.  The funny thing is most of the search engines do follow these links and see what’s on the other end, but they don’t let the “link juice” pass (some of the search engines.

Do nofollow backlinks have any value?  Yes.  Every search engine handles things differently but Yahoo (which is one of the big three search engines) does give some juice to nofollow backlinks.  If you can rank highly in any of the top 3 search engines for decent keywords you can expect a decent flow of traffic from them.  Of course Google is the big dog (and gets the biggest traffic) but it’s not the only player in the game.

When I submit sites I do try to get as much on “dofollow” sites as possible, but when I’m out for quantity links I hit everything from “nofollow” to “dofollow” to whatever else could be out there.  The “nofollow” links don’t hurt your rankings unless you’re blatantly spamming a million links all over the place.

If it looks like you’re link building is coming naturally you don’t have to fear search engine bannings, which is a big pain in the ass.