No - follow?

Many people think that the Nofollow links are not the ones we should look for.
Yes, sure I agree there is nothing better than a good quality Dofollow link, however there is also a value in Nofollow links.




How does look "nofollow" link?
Nofollow attribute looks in HTML as follows:

rel=”nofollow”>Kontener

The purpose of 'nofollow' link is to give the user a control over the link juice passed through his/hers links. Once you place 'rel="nofollow" the link mentioned with this attribute wont benefit from getting any link-juice from the website where it has been placed, at the same time it wont help with the PageRank flow.

Nofollows are commonly used on blogs comments, pages where from we can get referral (f.e. Wikipedia) and many websites which do not want their link juice to be passed over on the link receiver.


Nofollow and PageRank

The nofollow links wont help us with PageRank boost. In fact nofollow links cause evaporation of  the PageRank passed by other websites.

As it can be seen on the below shown graph, out of five links one is 'nofollow'.
All four links acquire for 80% of the PR flow meaning that 20% is missing due to the nofollow link presence.




Should we care about getting Nofollow?

This is rather a rhetorical question...

I believe it is impossible to gain only dofollow links when doing link building, besides it does look highly unnatural and hence suspiciously...

In my opinion it is good to keep a good balance of both dofollow and nofollow links, having in mind advantages we can get out of 'nofollow' links, here is a few of them:

- Nofollow links present link opportunities of their own
- NoFollow backlinks bring some traffic
- NoFollow backlinks diversify your link profile (it is good to have a healthy mix of DO and NO-follow links in our backlinks s o we can control the flow of internal link and it does not look too artificial for Google)
- NoFollow links present often social opportunities (social sites, social profiles)
- they could help us with vistor engagement (forum and blog comments, which might not count as "proper" links but will bring some valuable traffic)
- NoFollow backlinks draw attention (in the community, for link building purposes, content exchange etc.)
- so they ultimately lead to good SEO opportunities and traffic increase plus you might never know who will be visiting your website and what this visit will bring.*


* One of SEO girl website visitors became SEOgirl client so in that case 1 nofollow link helped me more than thousands Dofollows...