Do No Follow Links Impact SEO?

SEO No follow links – What are they?

The whole concept of SEO no follow links began back in 2005 when Google wanted a way to allow webmasters to credit or discredit the value of a given link on a web page.

No follow links were mainly developed to help combat spam by allowing webmasters to utilize the no follow tag as a way of indicating whether or not they trust that link and whether or not they want to pass on page rank and link juice to that web page thus devaluing the results of spammers.

Does an SEO No Follow Link Impact Your SEO?

If you’ve been around Internet marketing long enough, either as an affiliate marketer or as a product owner, you’re aware that if you want to get good rankings in the search engines, you need a lot of back links.

The main question many marketers ask, especially when they’re just starting out, is to know whether or not it’s worth it to get SEO no follow links back to their website. Do SEO no follow links have any impact on search engine rankings at all?

The answer to this question might surprise you the answer is yes and no.

A Google employee, Matt Cutts, once said that SEO no follow links do not pass page rank or anchor text juice to the external website, period. The fact is only do follow links will pass any page rank or anchor text link juice back to your website.

That is:

If you link your site to a do-follow site, the search engines will acknowledge your link, and you will get what is called a back link to your site. If you link your site to a no-follow site, the search engines will not acknowledge the link as a back link to your site.

What does this mean for you?

If you want to build back links to your site and get a higher Page Rank you need to make sure that you are linking to do-follow sites, which includes most high ranking sites with a high Page Rank and high authority.

If a “do follow” designation is made, Google will look at the link as a back link to your targeted page.

If a “no follow” designation is made, Google will not use it as a back link to your target.

Here’s an interesting fact about how Google might utilize links that are no follow to determine where your website belongs in the search engines. This concept comes from the theory that Google takes into account social metrics and click through data in their search engine algorithms.

What this means is although it cannot be proven, that Google takes into account links that get clicked in the popularity of a website simply by judging the existence and popularity of the back link on any given web page.

Matt Cutts from Google also added that any time they come across a no-follow link, they remove that link from the graph of the web as they call it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t consider the existence of the link, its purpose or that it might be of value for search engine positioning, but their algorithms are so complex and held under lock and key that would be hard to prove.

Sometimes, no follow sites are still valuable for traffic to your target, despite the fact that Google may not count it as a backlink, and there are some that argue that a no follow will still give you a little back link juice

Conclusion

All the facts state that no follow links will not increase your rankings in the search engines. However, the click-through data and the social metrics of the link may have some effect, but this cannot be proven. Milwaukee SEO Services can help you with no follow links and all your SEO needs, CONTACT US today!