Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
SEO’s have been arguing over the no follow tag for years without ever coming to a final conclusion. In mid 2005 Google first introduced the no follow tag to the world. In the very beginning, it was supposedly introduced to fend off spammers.
It was allegedly supposed to reduce link spam, especially blog comments. At the time, SEOs were using powerful commenting tools to manipulate link-building techniques. Blog comments were highly effective for this.
Google introduced the “no follow” tag as an HTML attribute people could add to their external links to preserve Page Rank. As mentioned before, Page Rank flows through links and is considered search engine currency.
Using the no follow tag stops a link from gaining any search engine benefits. It halts the flow of Page Rank and doesn’t impact the rankings of the linked website.
If you’re unfamiliar with HTML, don’t worry, you don’t need to fully understand it to use the no follow tag. Here’s what the attribute looks like in a normal link:
<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>
The no follow tag is a simple code you can insert into any link. It was initially supposed to reduce blog comment spam but didn’t entirely succeed, although it influenced the effectiveness of certain links.
The debate continues over the usefulness of no follow links. Are they truly ineffective? Should you focus solely on do-follow backlinks?
Though no one knows definitively, it’s clear that no follow links still have an effect on search engine rankings, albeit not as much as do-follow links.
Back to the origins of the no follow tag, it was also introduced to regulate the text link advertising industry. Text link ads are contextual links that advertisers pay for, and SEOs were abusing them for search engine benefits. The no follow tag was meant to keep these ads from impacting rankings.
Over time, the tag was also used internally within websites to channel Page Rank effectively. For example, category pages on a site might be no-followed to preserve Page Rank.
When linking externally, it’s advised to use the no follow tag on links that don’t contribute to your site’s relevancy or profitability, like affiliate links. But linking to relevant content without the tag can be beneficial to your SEO.
To sum up, no follow links are necessary to maintain a natural link profile, but ensure that most of your links are do-follow for better rankings.
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Comments
Alexandra Turner
I absolutely agree with this post! The no follow tag is such a crucial element in SEO that many people tend to overlook. Great insights, David! Keep up the good work.
Michael Novak
Hmm, I’m not sure if the results you mention are entirely accurate. Has there been any hard evidence or data showing how much impact no follow links still have on rankings?
Sarah Palmer
Thanks for the detailed explanation! I’ve always been confused about when to use the no follow tag. Do you think it’s beneficial for smaller blogs to use it as well?
John Rivera
I have to say, I found this post a bit lacking in real-world examples. While I understand the theory, a case study would have made it much more compelling.
Brandon Lee
This is interesting! It’s been a while, David, how have you been? Maybe we should catch up sometime! Keep up the great work with these posts.
Emily Sanchez
I encountered a similar issue with my own blog. I was losing Page Rank because I wasn’t using the no follow tag on external links. Your post came just in time to help me fix this!
George Henderson
There’s a tool called Ahrefs that I’ve been using to analyze my backlink profile, and it really helps with identifying where to place no follow tags. You should check it out if you haven’t already!
Linda Matthews
Thank you for this post, David! I didn’t realize how important it was to manage external links in this way. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m excited to implement these strategies.
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The actual HTML example is what makes this useful — most SEO posts talk in circles and never show you the attribute itself.
Pete’s right that the example is concrete, and I’d add why this specific advice matters for anyone with a replicated affiliate site: companies increasingly ask distributors to nofollow those links themselves, partly for exactly the reason described here, and partly because an army of identical outbound links from thousands of near-identical sites is its own red flag. I can’t speak to how Google actually weighs it, only that the request from the company side is real and usually not explained to the people asked to comply.
I think what’s being missed here, building on what Pete pointed out, is that the advice to keep affiliate links nofollowed and everything else dofollow is actually a discipline most people skip. It would be easy to nofollow everything out of caution, but the post is specifically telling you not to do that, and I think that’s the more useful half of the instruction.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but if I nofollow my affiliate links like the post says, does that mean the tag goes on every single link to that company’s site, or just the ones actually inside my own posts and pages? I genuinely cannot tell from the HTML example which one it means.