When implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, you have your work cut out for you. From enhancing your site’s structure to creating high quality content, you need to take care of various factors at once. When you throw in the many intricacies that are related to digital marketing, it gets all the more challenging to pull off this massive feat all by yourself.
Learning about nofollow links is one of those complexities. While they are crucial to running a successful search engine optimization campaign, they can be difficult to understand. At the same time, ignoring the usage of these links can harm your website and affect its online presence negatively.
To help you learn about these links, their importance and their function, here is the lowdown on nofollow backlinks and what they can do for your site.
What Are Nofollow Backlinks?
When it comes to search engine optimization, you have two main types of backlinks to work with: dofollow and nofollow. Both of these links appear as regular hyperlinks on webpages. There is no difference in how they look or how they function for a website’s visitor. But their functionality in search engine optimization sets them apart with quite some distinction.
When integrated on a webpage, a dofollow backlink passes down link juice to the referred website. On the other hand, a nofollow backlink doesn’t pass down any link juice to the referred domain.
Due to this basic description, it is easy for many people to think that dofollow backlinks are better than nofollow backlinks. But this remains a misconception. In the world of white hat search engine optimization, both types of links hold equal importance.
Why Are Nofollow Backlinks Important?
While nofollow links provide no link juice to referred websites, they have their own benefits to offer in terms of SEO.
They Keep You Safe From Penalization
Whenever you are sourcing backlinks from external websites, getting exclusively dofollow links can actually have adverse effects on your website. An abundance of dofollow links can signal to the search engines that you are getting your backlinks illicitly. As a result, your website can end up being penalized for not following proper search engine optimization protocols.
In contrast, using nofollow backlinks allows you to build a network of links without worrying about any penalties. When you utilize them along with a careful amount of dofollow backlinks, you can easily get your desired mentions and referrals from other websites without affecting your online presence.
They Provide You With Substantial Traffic
Since nofollow backlinks appear as regular hyperlinks on any webpage, they don’t discourage your target audience’s decision to click on the link. As a result, a nofollow backlink gives you just as much chances of driving traffic to your site as a dofollow backlink.
If you build your nofollow backlinks through a credible provider, this feature can become incredibly helpful. By getting your website’s link embedded within the content of high authority and high traffic websites, you can get a significant amount of traffic to your domain. If a reader finds your information or solutions to be helpful, they can link back to your website from their own platform. This increases your exposure and improves your chances of getting organic backlinks from other websites.
They Are Easier to Source
For any website, passing down link juice via excessive dofollow links can pose a risk of getting penalized by the search engines. This is why, credible platforms are quite selective in choosing the websites they refer to through their content.
In comparison, linking to informative or relevant websites through engaging content is helpful for all domains. This improves the quality of their content and has positive effects on their SEO. Due to this reason, nofollow links are easier to source, especially if you are working with a reliable provider with ties to high authority websites.
How to Set Up These Links?
Most websites that refer to you through their content would set up the links by themselves. But there will be instances where you are publishing or preparing the content on third-party platforms yourself.
Fortunately, setting up these links is easy. You just need to add the rel=“nofollow” tag to the hyperlink. That’s about it.
But whenever you are setting up nofollow backlinks, it is important to be careful in your practice.
Make sure that you are not making all of your links into nofollow backlinks, since that could affect your search engine optimization. Strike a proper balance between nofollow and dofollow links.
Ensure that most of the links that you have on your website are nofollow. You can check this by right-clicking a hyperlink and selecting “Inspect.” This will tell you if the link has the rel=”nofollow” tag.
Make it a point not to make your internal links into nofollow backlinks. This affects your website structure and internal linking.
Setting up nofollow backlinks can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. With a little time and effort, you can learn how to make the most out of these backlinks. In case you don’t have the time to take care of this aspect or need professional expertise, you can also consult a white hat search optimization provider to handle it for you.