Home / Questions / 31561
Accepted
Daniel Díaz
Asked: 2020-11-04 06:42:13 +0800 CST 2020-11-04 06:42:13 +0800 CST

Do nofollow links provide SEO?

  • 772

I am aware that nofollow links are specifically enforced so that search engine bots do not follow that link.

The reality is that this link attracts visitors and my theory is that a link, even if it has a nofollow for Google, for example, still has value, even if it is 1% compared to one without the nofollow.

Apart from this, what are the following values ​​for the rel attribute for because I don't see reliable information about it (the one that catches my attention is external).

I've only seen info here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_rel.asp

But it doesn't explain if there are differences in SEO issues or browser behaviors.

I have created several links to https://japanpanda.com/ being nofollow (On other pages) and I have not seen any changes except improvements in referals.

seo

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    About the values ​​that rela link can have, you can read more in the MDN documentation (partially in Spanish at the time of writing this answer) or directly in the W3C documentation for the HTML5 standard and the element a(in English).

    What it indicates relis the relationship between the document containing the link and the linked document. It does not affect how the browser will render those links , although it can be used in the CSS attribute selector (eg: a[rel="valor"]) to give them some specific styling.

    For SEO, it helps to make sense (semantics) of the page and can be helpful for social engineering (for example, specifying the author) or to better classify/index the content and its relationships with other pages/sites.

    Now I am going to go into a little more detail about the nofollowand the external.

    nofollow

    The first thing to clarify is that nofollowthis does not mean that search engine bots will not follow the link, in fact, they will most likely follow it. According to the HTML5 definition (my translation):

    The keyword nofollowindicates that the link is not endorsed by the page's original author or publisher, or that the link to the referenced document was included primarily because of a business relationship between persons affiliated with both pages.

    Bearing that in mind, putting a nofollowto a link will not affect the traffic of the destination (the link can be visited by users) or its discovery by search engines (not following is a "recommendation" for the bot). ) but, as they say in the comments, it can affect (negatively) the page that contains the link. The ranking of a page is going to depend in part on the analysis of the sites linked to that page .

    For example, if a search engine considers "Page Z" to be bad because it has spam and spyware, and your "Page Y" has a link to that "Page Z", then that search engine is going to penalize you for linking to a page that you know is bad. That is why it is important to use nofollowin some links.

    As a general rule, the recommendation would be that you do not trust any link that comes from a user input (for example in the comments of a blog or in the answers of a forum) and add it nofollowto save yourself problems.

    In this Google article (in Spanish) three important cases are mentioned in which using nofollowis good and recommended:

    • If you don't trust the linked content . Basically because of what was said above, to " avoid transferring PageRank values ​​unconsciously to the "undesirable neighborhoods" of the Web ". It is also mentioned as a method of deterring spammers (by being able nofollowto manually remove the for links you have checked).
    • If it is a payment link . Search engines want paid/commercial links to be identified and value it, " just as online and traditional consumers value commercial relationships disclosed (for example, when a newspaper ad includes the headline 'Ad ') "
    • To give tracking priority . For example, so that bots don't follow links to "register here" or "login" sections, because " search engine bots can't access or register as members of your forum ".

    external

    In the particular case of the value external, what is being said is that the linked document/page is a different site. If the user presses it, they will leave the current site to navigate to a different one.

    It won't affect you SEO-wise, it just adds some semantic information (although I don't really know what the value of that information is because the search engine will automatically detect if the link is external or not).

    From the comments I've found searching online, it seems that in the past some browsers treated rel="external"it as if it were a target="_blank"and would have the link in a new window (although I haven't found anything official about that).

    • 14

  2. All links add value. Do follow links are the best, but if we only have do follow links to a website, it would be very suspicious. That is why it is good to mix them. Here are some tools to know if they are do follow or no follow:

    https://www.informacionyarte.com/analyze-backlinks

    Hope this can help you

    • 0

  3. Nofollow links, if they are well placed, have a certain value. They drive traffic to the site which indirectly helps with page rank.

    See: https://moz.com/blog/the-hidden-power-of-nofollow-links

    • -1