Follow and No Follow Links – What’s the Difference?
How links help SEO
When a page on a website gets an inbound link (a hyperlink pointing to that page) the page gets a small SEO boost depending on the site it has come from, obviously more reputable sites will 
give you a bigger boost. For instance getting a link from a top News or Dental website will be extremely rewarding. Think of a link as a point, and the more links you have, the more points you receive.
Google has created a way of calculating these points into something called PageRank where Google assumes that if a lot of people are linking to a certain page, it must be a good page and so rewards the website accordingly. This is because Google only wants to deliver the very best pages to its users.
Follow Links
“Follow links” are links that count as points, boosting the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them go higher in the search engine results. PageRank exists to see what pages are the most popular.
No Follow Links
A “no follow” link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favour, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the search engine results. The nofollow tag is basically a sign for search engines saying “don’t count this.” If there was no such thing as No Follow it would mean there would be even more spam than there currently is.
Before the nofollow tag, link-building was an easy way to artificially boost page rankings by using black-hat SEO. More inbound links meant better PageRank which meant people were determined to get as many links as possible, even if it meant spamming everyone to get them. Blog comments were the worst culprit filled with self-promotional linking.
The no follow link tag has done a lot of good online as most spammers won’t bother posting irrelevant links to blogs or forums if they know they won’t ever get a follow link. WordPress automatically assigns the no follow tag to all user-submitted links and Wikipedia does the same for its reference section.
No follow links primarily belong in:
- Paid links
- Comments
- Forums
- Anything involving what Google calls “untrusted content”
Don’t bother with No Follow Links?
Not at all! Just because they don’t provide SEO link value doesn’t mean no follow links are worthless as they still provide valuable referral traffic. A well-placed blog comment or a relevant forum post, no follow or not, can send a huge amount of traffic to your website, which then can funnel down to leads!
Search engines today are looking at a lot of factors outside of link traffic and PageRank. Social signals from Twitter and Facebook are increasingly valuable, despite being no follow. The key is to build your practice, don’t think of what links are good for SEO, but instead think what links are good for your business, the ethos of your practice, and what links can help you establish and stand out from the rest.
Links, no follow or not, build trust!
If you would like any further information then give Dental Design a call on: 01202 677277.
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