Payday loans

When to Use a No Follow Tag

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

When to Use a No Follow Tag
Using no follow tags on your website should always be done with caution because a no follow can often times provoke further investigation from the search engines. Keeping that in mind, you better make sure everything else on your website is 100% squeaky clean. If you are not sure how to manipulate PageRank throughout your website by the clever use of no follow tags don’t worry about it but there are some important instances you should use a no follow to either be safe or simply not waste your link power in areas it where it is clearly not needed.

Paid Advertising
If you have a paid advertising model on your website where you sell ad space those ads should always have a no follow tag on them. Since Google has come out and said paid links are bad and very frowned upon you want to make sure you don’t run the risk of receiving a penalty by selling links, because a paid advertising spot with a do follow tag on it is nothing more than a paid link in the eyes of the search engines.

Trust Badges
It is very popular for website to have a series of trust badges from the Better Business Bureau and sites like VeriSign that sometimes link out to those sites. You don’t need to pass on any link juice to those sites if you don’t have to, so put a no follow tag on that link to let the search engines know nothing is passing on to those websites.

Internal Linking
Internal linking to pages sometimes doesn’t need to be a followed link. For example, if you are linking to a contact page or maybe a testimonial page that might not need to have link power passed over to it, however, if you are linking to an important service or product page than you will want to leave the do follow status on it.

Sculpting the flow of your PageRank needs to be done very carefully and within guidelines at all times. Once the search engines catch you doing this they will monitor you like a hawk and give more weight to analyzing your moves so make sure it is important and everything else you do is by the books.

8 Responses to “When to Use a No Follow Tag”

  • Boise SEO says:
    January 7, 2011 at 6:39 am

    All good stuff to think about. Sometimes we get so bogged down with all the other stuff we think is more important we tend to forget this aspect. Thanks for the great article.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    January 7, 2011 at 6:03 pm

    Thanks Boise for reading! So very true!

    Take Care!
    Nick

  • Ileane says:
    January 8, 2011 at 12:01 am

    Hi Nick, I always think in terms of DoFollow but you’re so right about using NoFollow in these instances. Thanks for the advice.

  • Lord Matt says:
    January 8, 2011 at 11:22 am

    I have been reading that google still pass value to nofollow pages but that they don’t follow it on the crawl. This seems to be held out in that some pages with no indexing at all still show up in the SERPs. With that in mind I’m left wondering what value nofollow has these days. Should I spend time sculpting or just noindex the pages that have no value showing up in results (like my contact form)?

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    January 8, 2011 at 1:53 pm

    Hi Matt,

    Thanks for reading and your comment!

    I tend to not page rank sculpt these days that much but unless of course it is as you mentioned a page that has no SEO value…

    Take Care!
    Nick

  • Casey says:
    January 10, 2011 at 11:01 pm

    Do you recommend the use of No Follow when linking to external sites like facebook and twitter?

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    January 11, 2011 at 11:34 am

    Hi Casey,

    Thanks for reading and your question!

    I actually do not recommend adding a no follow tag to any social links that your site might be linking to, such as Twitter of Facebook pages. You should want to pass over authority and “juice” over from your site to these profiles since these are important pages (your social profiles) to get positioned well in the search engines as well…

    Hope this helps and answers your question.

    Thanks again for reading,
    Nick

  • Sean C. says:
    January 28, 2011 at 8:22 pm

    Hi Nick, I’m very new to the IM/AF/SEO world and am trying to get my mind around the “dofollow” “nofollow” issue but I still don’t “get it!”

    I recently got a comment on my site and in the text of the comment there was a couple of words that had a link imbedded back to thei commentor’s web site. Is this good or bad? I thought the whole purpose of getting comments on sites like mine that are “stores” selling things was to get those back links so the search engines see that people are coming to the site.

    Have I somehow “missed” the boat again (not surprising given the steepness of the learning curve :-)

    Thanks for the nice post/content – I’ll be back!

    Sean C.

^ Back to Top ^