When it comes to off–page SEO and link building, nofollow links often get overlooked. Nofollow links are imperative to a successful SEO strategy, with many benefits beyond just providing backlink diversity – which is important in itself. In this article, we‘ll explore the advantages of nofollow links, and why it‘s important to include them in your overall link building plan.
First and foremost, it‘s important to understand what a nofollow link is and how it works. A nofollow link is a link to a website or webpage holding no link juice authority. This means that the link holds no (direct) weight in terms of SEO, and thus does not pass link juice. This feature is built into HTML, and search engines look at the ‘nofollow’ tag to identify such links.
Nofollow links can effectively reduce the risk of an unnatural backlink profile. Part of building a safe link portfolio is to acquire a variety of link types, including both ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links. Sometimes, webmasters or SEO practitioners will seek out mainly dofollow links, ignoring or avoiding the nofollow class altogether.
This can result in an overly-optimized backlink profile and give off suspicious signals. It’s essential to create a mixture of both dofollow and nofollow links to diversify the sources of link juice and to reassure Google that your links are coming from various places.
Take a look at Google’s documentation regarding nofollow links and the new ‘ugc’ and ‘sponsored’ tags:
In addition to the link profile performance benefits, nofollow links can also contribute to building website traffic.
Despite not passing any link juice, nofollow links can still be crawled and indexed by search engines, and they can also direct referral traffic to your website. Since nofollow links are often posted on highly trafficked websites and blogs, getting a few nofollow links from such sources can introduce your website to a new pool of potential visitors.
Including nofollow links as part of a website’s link building plan is necessary in order to achieve safe and secure rankings, increase referral traffic and stay safe in the eyes of Google. Nofollow links provide improved backlink diversity, making them a vital component of any link building plan.
Thus, make sure your link portfolio includes a healthy portion of nofollow links, and you will be well on your way to achieving better off-page SEO performance and improved rankings.
Concluding:
You will not see a direct impact by using them, but high DA nofollow links, which are also in context relevant with your site, are known to help in keeping a diversified and strong backlink profile, thus there is a long-term SEO boost benefit. You just need to avoid low-quality, irrelevant profile backlinks.
Here is a Reddit links for SEO service that can help achieve just that. So why Reddit? Reddit is a high-DA website trusted by Google, so having you links surrounded by context about your niche makes for a powerful social signal.
Many SEO’ers from the most popular SEO forum BlackHatWorld shared their opinion on this thread, and it seems many of them agreeing on the importance of this type of links.
Highlighting some of the comments of prominent members that are dealing with SEO on a day-by-day basis:
