If you’re confused about when to use nofollow links, you’ve come to the right place. The blogging tips I’m sharing with you will tell you when you should be using nofollow links on your blog.
Before we get into when to use nofollow links, I think it’s import to discuss both dofollow and nofollow links as both terms are commonly used when talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
What Are Dofollow Links
In short, dofollow links tell search engines to follow the link.
Search engines use dofollow links as a way to determine where a blog or website should rank in the page results.
What this means is that if you have multiple sites (related to your niche) naturally linking to your blog with dofollow links, search engines take that to mean your site is trustworthy and is providing high-quality content. Having relevant dofollow links pointing back to your blog positively influences your page rank.
What Are Nofollow links
A nofollow link is the opposite of a dofollow link in that it tells search engines to NOT follow the link. When a link is set to nofollow, in the “eyes” of the search engine, that link doesn’t point to anything. This means nofollow links do not increase nor decrease your page rank in search engines.
When to Use Nofollow links
You Don’t Want to Endorse The Site
Perhaps you think the website or its content is questionable. Or maybe you just don’t want to influence the page rank of the site. If either of those is the case, make the link nofollow.
Your comments section
If you’re using WordPress or Blogger, your comments section is set to nofollow by default. This means when readers leave their link on your blog, Google will not follow the link.
While there are plugins available to make your comments dofollow, having your comments set to nofollow is good practice. This helps prevent people from spamming your comments because they want a dofollow link (remember, those are good for increasing your page rank).
Paid Links and Ads
Whenever you place an affiliate link or ad on your blog (this includes your posts and widgets) you should make those links/ads nofollow.
If you have third-party ads on your blog, it’s likely that the job has already been done for you. Also, if you’re using Adsense ads, you do not need to add a nofollow tag.
If you don’t make your paid links and ads nofollow, you can be penalized by Google. Google wants all paid links to be set to nofollow because they do not want those links to influence search results, or to impact the user experience negatively.
How to Write Nofollow Links
You can make a link nofollow by manually adding
rel="nofollow"
to your html link. So, it would look something like this:
<a href="https://beautifuldawndesigns.net/" rel="nofollow">Beautiful Dawn Designs</a>
If you want your link to open in a new tab, it would look like this:
<a href="https://beautifuldawndesigns.net/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Beautiful Dawn Designs</a>
There are also plugins available that allow you to make your link nofollow by simply checking a box. Ultimate Nofollow is a good plugin to use for this. I recommend manually inserting the nofollow tag because it’s easy to do, and that’s one less plugin you have installed on your site.
How to Spot Nofollow Links
Both the Chrome and Firefox browsers offer extensions that detect and outline all nofollow links on the pages you visit on the web.
For Chrome, you can use the Nofollow extension, and for Firefox, there is the NoDoFollow add-on.
I hope you’ve found this post helpful in explaining dofollow and nofollow links. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
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