PDA

View Full Version : No follow link



jamesray50
11-06-2012, 12:16 AM
I'm not sure what a no follow link is. But I was reading about how to add an affiliate link in the sidebar of my website and one of the articles said that if you are being compensated it needs to be disclosed. The article said if it's not disclosed then Google could quit ranking the website and the best way to disclose compensation was to mark the no follow link. I am confused. Would someone explain this to me?

Thanks,

vangogh
11-06-2012, 02:48 AM
A nofollow link is one that has rel="nofollow" included in the code for a link. It would look something like this.



<a href="affiliate-domain.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">some text here</a>


It's there to tell search engines that even though you're linking to that page, you aren't voting for the page in the sense of saying it's a quality page. The original reason was so it could be added to blog comments. People comment and leave a link, but you don't really know where the link is going. It was supposed to help fight spam. Over time Google in particular expanded what nofollow means. Now it's supposed to tell search engines don't follow this link and so search engines won't pass any value through the link. In other words they shouldn't give that link any weight in their algorithms. That's the idea at least.

Where affiliate links are concerned Google has decided they shouldn't count as votes either. Their view is you aren't recommending the other page, you're only linking to it because of a possible financial transaction. I doubt you'll see any problem if you don't add the nofollow to the affiliate links. I think Matt Cutts of the Google spam team recently suggested people add it if they're worried Google might do something negative, but it was a suggestion not a commandment.

That said unless you want to help the site your linking to rank better you could always add rel="nofollow" when you have the time.

rajesh
11-16-2012, 10:08 AM
A nofollow tag in the <a href> tag passes no PR juice to the following website. It is denoted by rel="nofollow". By default, all links are dofollow links. A nofollow link from a PR10 website is similar to a dofollow link from a PR0 website. Webmasters use a nofollow tag to link to other websites if they are not relevant to their content.

WebEminence
01-02-2013, 09:26 PM
I think when you read "compensation", it may be referring to paid advertising. For example, if someone pays you to advertise on your site with a link, you should make the link a "no follow" link since Google doesn't like paid links. Since you're asking about affiliate links, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to make those "no follow" also since you're not concerned with passing PR to them but simple sending traffic through the link.

vangogh
01-03-2013, 11:18 AM
I think when you read "compensation", it may be referring to paid advertising.

I think so too and agree that Google would prefer to see those links with a nofollow applied.

SDGSteve
01-03-2013, 12:30 PM
A nofollow link from a PR10 website is similar to a dofollow link from a PR0 website.

This isn't right at all. A link from a PR0 could well be detrimental to your SEO whilst a nofollow on a PR10 will make little difference either way. The nofollow link may well be better for driving human traffic to websites and anyone link building should try and get a balance of nofollow and dofollow links for it to look natural to Google, the two types of links are useful in various ways.

Otherwise I agree with the thoughts that Google want paid links to be marked nofollow. Personally I'd be surprised if you got "punished" for forgetting, but it's probably good practice to do it.

vangogh
01-03-2013, 03:20 PM
I mostly agree. I don't think a link from a PR0 site would be detrimental. It just won't contribute much in the way of PR to your page. In general I think we'd all do better to worry less about things like PR and nofollow and think in terms of which sites can better drive traffic to ours. Ironically when you do that and not worry so much about how a search engine will see the link, you end up getting the links search engines want to see. Not that you shouldn't understand how PR and nofollow and many other things work, but that you shouldn't spend all your time focusing on them, especially at the exclusion of how real people will see the links.

Zerocool7
03-19-2013, 05:54 PM
I always hear that Google does not look at nofollow links. What gets me though is that I have seen Webpages that have 99% nofollow backlinks that are in the #1 position in Google for fairly competitive keywords. I know backlinks is not the only ranking factor but it is pretty important nowadays. How could this be?

vangogh
03-20-2013, 02:10 AM
They say they don't follow them, but I've seen some pretty clear evidence they do crawl them. No follow links in theory shouldn't pass any Page Rank and so shouldn't contribute to a page's ranking. I say in theory, because you never know, but I do think Google is being honest about this and generally doesn't give them any value.

As for what you saw, there could be a number of reasons. Sure links are important, but they aren't the only factors so other things could have been and probably are contributing to the how well the page ranks. Also Google never shows all the links they know about pointing to a web page so while you observed mostly nofollow links, it's possible there were more followed links that you saw. It's also possible the 1% of followed links you did see were some pretty good links. Not all links are created equal.