{"id":29954,"date":"2024-11-12T12:40:03","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T12:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/blog\/wiki\/nofollow-links\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T09:23:22","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T09:23:22","slug":"Nofollow_Links","status":"publish","type":"wiki","link":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/wiki\/Nofollow_Links","title":{"rendered":"Nofollow Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are nofollow links?<\/span><\/h2>\n
\n
\"nofollow<\/a> <\/p>\n
Figure:<\/b> Nofollow vs. Dofollow – Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nofollow links are links with the rel=\u201dnofollow\u201d<\/code> tag, that tells search engines<\/a> not to follow the link. This reduces their effectiveness at improving your search engine rankings since search engines don\u2019t use them as a strong ranking signal.\n<\/p>\n

In the past, when PageRank<\/a> was still made visible by Google, Nofollow links did not pass PageRank which showed they weren\u2019t very effective at improving a site\u2019s off-page SEO. Since PageRank is no longer made visible by Google, the difference between links with and without the nofollow attribute can only be seen through correlative research on the SERPs<\/a>, or in-the-field tests.\n<\/p>\n

Why the nofollow tag exists<\/span><\/h2>\n

The nofollow tag exists to tell search engines that a link shouldn\u2019t count towards a website\u2019s ranking. In the early days of SEO, backlink<\/a> spam used to be an easy way of increasing rankings. This allowed black hat SEOs<\/a> to build a large quantity of low-quality links, like blog comment links, in order to manipulate the search engine algorithms. This often happened at the expense of the sites the links were being placed on.\n<\/p>\n

However, in 2005, the nofollow attribute was introduced to help reduce link building spam, allowing website owners to ask search engines not to count a link towards the site\u2019s ranking.\n<\/p>\n

Backlinks pass link juice<\/a> which influenced the PageRank of a domain when it was still made public by Google. When PageRank was visible, links with a Dofollow attribute clearly passed PageRank onto the page that was linked to, showing that Google used the link. Links with the nofollow attribute didn\u2019t pass PageRank on to the page they linked to.\n<\/p>\n

The nofollow attribute allowed webmasters to indicate to search engines that they did not want their site to be associated with a link. Originally used to tackle blog comment spam, they have since started being used for a wider range of situations when a link hasn\u2019t been earned.\n<\/p>\n

When nofollow links are used<\/span><\/h2>\n