How do follow and no follow links differ?

If you’ve done any link building, you’ve heard of a “nofollow” tag. What does this mean and why would you care?

Automated Transcript:

Hi, lavanya it submitted, a couple questions. So I want to take those first. But when I catch up with everybody too and see, if there’s any other questions so lavanya do you want to just start by asking one of your questions? I remember one of them is what’s the difference between follow and don’t follow so, talking about link building. There are two different kinds of links to follow Link in the nofollow link. That’s what you want to ask about, right? Okay, great question. So we know that for SEO, one of the most important things as far as how Google decides to serve up. Your site is links from other websites to your site, right? And we’ve used the analogy that it’s kind of like a roomful of plumbers, and all we know there’s a roomful plumbers because every plumber has plumber on their hat. Plumber on their shirt. In the truck it says plumber. But we don’t know who’s the best plumber. We just know there’s a lot of plumbers. Well, link building. Okay. So, we know, if, in that scenario, we knew in that room, just because you have the more instances of the word plumber, on your web, on your body, doesn’t make you the best plumber. What makes someone in that room? The best plumber, the plumber who everyone points to insist that guy. There, that person is the best plumber. The same thing is true about links. What makes the best website of all the websites available for any given? Keyword is it the website that mentions that keyword that webpage that web mentions a keyword more than anybody else? No, it’s the webpage that receives more links from the other websites. That’s how Google knows the most credible website. Now once you figure that out, it’s really tempting to abuse that Because you’ve all gotten emails, where it’s like, hey give me five bucks in the, give you a hundred links to your website, or something stupid like that, right? And so Google has had to crack down on, on bad links. And one of the ways they crack down on bad links is allowing webmasters or web coders or what developers to add a Food within a link. That says, no follow in the link. And so what when Google sees a link that has the Rel attribute of nofollow and we made it will look at an example, what we see is Google will say I’m not going to use that link to give the website that receives that link credit from an SEO perspective. so, for instance, if you have a WordPress website and you have comments enabled on your blog posts, you’ll notice there’s a field when someone makes a comment that they can put their website in your your comment to your blog, right? Well, what if you wanted to build links to your site you could go out and you could build a make write a bunch of comments and other websites. It puts your website link in there and all those websites within link to you, right? This is why we have automated systems. We get all kinds of crappy comments in our WordPress blogs, all the time, right? Yeah. Because systems are automatically generating this, well, should those links count for credibility? If I go to your website, login, Submit a comment and then link back to my website is that your website voting for credibility of my web? No that’s me voting for The credibility, my website using your website. So WordPress does by default is adds this nofollow attribute in the link and that tells Google hey we know there’s a link from our website to another website but we don’t want you to count it for credit. Okay, so there’s all kinds of places where one link from one website to another has the Rel nofollow link attribute. Most social media posts have the Rel nofollow link. so that means by posting on Facebook, if Google is able to read Facebook and sometimes it can’t even read Facebook. Google Sees the link from your Facebook page, to your page. Should that be counting for SEO? Well, not really because you posted on Facebook, it’s not Facebook saying your website’s greatest. You saying your website’s great on Facebook, and so, Facebook ads, the nofollow attribute to darlink. So Google knows not to count that link for SEO purposes. Now, can people follow the not nofollow link? Absolutely. And so great. Now, people come from from Facebook to your page, it’s Valuable to post on Facebook. But it’s not an SEO Factor because of the nofollow link. As you go through different websites, linking to your site, you can look to see if it’s a no follow or not. So we’ve talked about link citations or citation websites for locals listings lately, for instance, Yelp or super Pages or Yahoo Pages, if you inspect those links, Most of them have the realm nofollow attribute. It doesn’t mean it’s not a useful link. It’s a lot of using that link. A lot of people use Yelp, and if you’re on Yelp, A lot of people can find your site but Google won’t use that Rel, nofollow attribute. So it will read that and say, I’m not going to give SEO credit for this link from Yelp to your website. So that is what the nofollow attribute is about. So let’s let me show you an example of this by sharing my screen. Okay, so here we are. So if I go to let’s go to just look up reliable Acorn, my main company on Yelp, All right, Yelp reliable acorn. Hey, there’s a link to my website. That’s awesome. Now we can do a couple things we can. What we probably need to do is we can inspect this link And it’ll show us in the code but boom, as it loads up. There it is. Okay, so you see the if you know any HTML, the a is the with the is used as a link and it links to the H ref, in this case, it’s not even a link to my website. It’s going through some sort of redirect because you’ll notice it goes to their own website URL. But even if it didn’t have a redirect, you see this Rel equals no opener nofollow. This word nofollow is what’s important for that link. So that means Google won’t count this link to my website. So, that is why what the nofollow means, and why it’s important. Clear as mud. Always. Does that answer the question lavanya? Yes. But with the null follow like if I were to go to your website what link to your website, but you would have to put a nofollow on your website in order for it, not to count Robert, write some content Management Systems, like WordPress comments will do it automatically for you. But it’s usually something you have to add in a, in in a website. Okay. Great question. I’m glad you asked.