SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

SEO Myth – “NoFollow” Links Do Not Count As Links in Google

Posted by admin on May, 26th 2010

Many people fall in the trap of buying ebooks online claiming to have the secret of SEO success only to find the ebook is years out of date and has irrelevant SEO knowledge.
Another thing these ebooks can contain is misinformation such as the “NoFollow” myth.

The NoFollow tag was introduced by Google to stop blog spammers getting lots of free backlinks by commenting on peoples’ blog posts. Blogging software such as WordPress automatically implemented the NoFollow tag on comment links so (in theory) the average blogger would receive much less blog comment spam.  This also helped out forum owners whereas people were adding a backlink into their signature which was displayed under every post they made; they could make all these links NoFollow and stop anyone posting rubbish.

Suddenly a lot of SEO workers worldwide were on the hunt for blogs, forums and social networks that didn’t implement the NoFollow tag to get around this.  These awful SEO guides teach people to search for “DoFollow” blogs and then spam these people for backlinks with little mention of actually writing unique content on their sites!

Not only that, websites were ‘sculpting’ their sites by adding the NoFollow tag to drive page rank to their most important pages; you used to be able to boost your sales page and have a whole site revolve around it!

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Google changed how the NoFollow tag works; it now passes on a fraction of page rank through the link and makes absolutely no promise not to index the page that has been linked to even if it’s linked to by a single NoFollow link.

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Want to see the power of NoFollow links? Twitter links from profile to profile are NoFollow tagged yet having millions of followers give the profile page an incredible Page Rank, just look at these examples:

 
William Shatner – 0.25 Million Follower – Page Rank 7 – http://twitter.com/williamshatner
Stephen Fry – 1.5 Million Followers – Page Rank 8 – http://twitter.com/stephenfry
Barack Obama – 4 Million Followers – Page Rank 8 – http://twitter.com/barackobama

 
There’s a strong rumor that you could get sandboxed by Google by having too many DoFollow links; if you were to gain links naturally you’d have a mixture of Do/NoFollow links so always make sure to get a healthy amount of NoFollow links in your SEO strategy… just in case.

 

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