Does The Nofollow Attribute In Links Kill Your Link Popularity?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Does the nofollow attribute in links kill your link popularity? There’s good news. Nofollow doesn’t kill link popularity.
There is a tendency to think that the nofollow attribute in links is a link popularity and search engine optimization killer. It isn’t. While there are valid reasons for including the nofollow attribute in your links, it isn’t always necessary. Though if you feel like it is necessary then at least you should know that you’ll still get link juice from those links. Google is the only search engine that recognizes the nofollow attribute. Yahoo! ignores it completely.

We’ve seen nofollow links get counted by Yahoo! left and right. If you check your link popularity you’ll find that the Yahoo! count is almost always higher than the Google count. That’s because Yahoo! is a lot less strict on links than Google. So how does this apply if you want to engage in link building?

One danger for many webmasters is in buying or selling links. Many webmasters are afraid to sell links for fear that Google will de-list them. But Google won’t de-list you if you sell nofollow links. They don’t want you transferring PageRank or selling links for authority. They don’t care if you sell links for traffic. Sell as many links as you want and nofollow them. Your link buyers will still get points with Yahoo! for link popularity and, of course, the nofollow attribute won’t affect their traffic at all.