While optimizing Websites, SEO experts believe in building links with good neighbourhood & niche related websites as very important, and the links will be of no use and moreover they look spammy in the eyes of Search Engine Spiders if the links pointed to their sites with a No-Follow Attribute. There are 3 types of Website Links -Internal linking within a website, External Incoming links, and External Outgoing links. I would like to give you a clear picture on the External Outgoing links and the importance of NoFollow tags.
External Outgoing links
These are the links that are pointed to the external (related) websites. Though these are not considered as important in a SEO standpoint for a website, because of link juice dissipation. But, these are considered by the Search Engine Algorithms when they are less in number and related to the context (or the topic of a web page).
External links are categorised in two ways (Direct links & Links with NoFollow Tags) - Direct linking from a website will have citations directly linking to a website and that is considered (or followed) by search engine spiders, giving value to those links. Whereas, No-Follow links from a website are the links to external website(s), that cannot be theoritically followed by the Search Engines.
NoFollow Tags and its importance:
No-Follow links on a website are the links to external website(s) with a tag rel="nofollow". This will allow a website to link to external sites without losing its valuable link juice. That means the anchor text links with NoFollow tags will allow a website or a webpage to retain its quality in an SEO perspective.
In early 2005, Google announced that hyperlinks with nofollow attribute would "not" influence the link target's PageRank (in addition, the Yahoo and Bing search engines also respect this attribute), allowing to retain the value of a website on which they are used. For instance: Wikipedia.org.
However, contradictions in category (2) are more difficult to, Matt Cutts in his recent video answers two related questions about the Nofollow links and whether Google considers NoFollow tags as its ranking factors or not.
Question – Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of Nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia where are links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google algorithms? (by Vince Samios UK)
Question – Does Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from well established authority websites such as Wikipedia? (by Jonaths , UK)
Matt Cutts answers to them saying:
Nofollow links are actually a very small percentage of the entire web.
Wikipedia links wont directly help you in any rank boost on the SERPs.
There are lot of factors that help determine whether a site or person linking using the nofollow tag (From Wikipedia or otherwise) carries “trust” or not. If they are trusted sources, then the nofollow tag could be ignored.
Basically the nofollow tag is a tool to keep away spammers.
Check out Matt's video:
I have demonstrated a NoFollow Checker Tool in my previous topic - SEO Tools for "SEO aspirants"to check whether or not a website points External Links with "No-Follow Tags". This tool will allow to check whether or not a website or web pages points links to the external sites with Nofollow.
I am an In-house Search Marketer handling Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) activities for an MNC in Chennai. I write this SEO blog posting on emarketing Trends and review SEO Tools with rave insights and topics at SEOChat, Highrankings.com, Mediapost, SEMPO among others to that could be helpful for the users who are inclined towards Internet Marketing.
