What are “nofollow” Links and are they important for your SEO Strategy?

Lets start with links and their importance.

“Backlinks” are incoming links to your website and they are an important component of achieving visibility of your website on the search engines.

Search engines have algorithms that measure the number of backlinks a website or web page has, and ranks those web pages with more and relevant backlinks in a higher position.

The more quality backlinks a page has, the more value it will have in the eyes of the search engines. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO success. A spider will follow a link on one page to visit the next page, and will therefore pass on credibility and influence from one page to the next.

What is the Nofollow attribute?

Nofollow is an html attribute value that tells search engines not to pass on any credibility or influence to an outbound link. In other words, you are telling the search engines ‘don’t follow this link”

The nofollow tag looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/”rel=”nofollow”>your text here</a>

The nofollow tag was originally designed to prevent blog spam. If you have a blog you may know lots of people leave pointless messages with links to their own sites. They do that in the hope they get a benefit from their links on your blog.

Why would you use the no follow tag?

You would use the nofollow tag if for example, if you do not trust (or cannot vouch for) the content of an outbound link.

Or if you have a blog, the nofollow tag makes it less interesting to “spam” your site with comments and links.

Remember that a link ‘leaks” PageRank from the page the link is on. The nofollow attribute will prevent your site from passing valuable PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web, and prevents “leakage” therefore holding on to your hard earned PageRank.

In turn, if your link is on a site with a nofollow tag on it, you will not benefit from the PageRank of the linking site. When you build links to your website you should keep in mind that the web page where your link has been placed should not have the “nofollow” attribute.

What is PageRank sculpting and does it make sense?

It is your homepage that normally has the highest PageRank and from there is gets distributed to your internal pages. But not all your pages need to have PageRank so a nofollow tag reserves the PageRank where it matters.

Many people have resorted to trying to influence how PageRank is distributed on their site. This is often referred as PageRank sculpting.

For example, you may have an RSS feed on your site so people can easily subscribe to your content. There is no reason for this feed to appear in search results and hence it does not need PageRank. To avoid sharing the link juice you could opt to put a nofollow tag on that link.

However, Google’s Matt Cutss explains in his own blog that nofollow links do NOT help sites rank higher in Google search results.

Should you use a Nofollow tag? Is it all worth it?

There are some instances where placing nofollow links make sense. If you have a blog you simply could not vouch for the links people place in their comments. Or if you had a page that did not have to appear in any search results ever, you could use the nofollow tag (in conjunction with the No Follow Meta Tag).

Nonetheless, I would recommend you focus on writing simply great content that people are keen to link to. That is what its all about.

What About SEO in Personalized Google Search Results?

Have you heard the news yet?

Your Google Search Results Will Now Show Personalized Results.

How will this affect the rankings of your website?

How Personalized Search works

Google’s Web History allows you to view all the pages you have visited, including your Google Searches. Over time Google will deliver a more personalized search result as it can now draw from your search behaviour. Google takes note of the sites you have clicked on so your favourite sites will get a higher ranking on your next search.

For all of you who already had a google account, this has been happening since 2006. But now, Google has made this available for all users.  So no more need to be signed in.

Your search engine results Page (SERP) will only be affected for searches that relate to you web history of course of the last 180 days!!

Great! So the most relevant pages will achieve better rankings.

But how will this affect Search Engine Optimisation? Do you Still Need it?

Some concerns;

• Will a customer no longer be able to see your site if it already favours a competitor’s site?
• You may think you have excellent ranking whereas in fact, your search results page is skewed towards your own preferences…

SO, the rules of the games have just been changed a little

• You will no longer be able to see a consistent ranking
• For competitive keywords on-page optimisation and link building will become less important
• If you have a NEW website in a competitive industry, ranking will become exceptionally hard

Great Opportunities

• Most people will not be clicking on lousy websites anymore and they will slowly be pushed out. So good websites with great, relevant content will slowly move up the search results pages.
• In a personalized search result page, it is easier to stand out when a ‘new’ snippet appears. So new and fresh content from blogs, Twitter and Facebook will become more important.
• The relevancy of your snippets and meta descriptions in the Google Search Results Page will become even more important.
• You must now focus on the long-tail keywords as generic and single word keywords will be even more difficult to rank for.
• If you have regular repeat visitors you may actually find yourself get better rankings.

SEO- More than rankings

SEO is not just about achieving top 10 rankings.

SEO is also about the structure of your website and the user experience, its about getting ‘better’ traffic to your site, getting that traffic to ‘convert’.

Other elements like keyword research and selection are still very important and when ‘relevancy’ has just been given a new boost, the right keyword selection is seven more paramount.

….Of course, if you don’t like it you can always switch to BING or turn it off…

Click on the links below to see the screen shots of how to do that…

How to use your free Google Ad

Google Adwords may not be free, but there is another opportunity to advertise on Google and it’s actually free. Roughly 75% of people click on the organic search results. If you could advertise on the organic listing – would you do it?

You can…

When your customer finds you on the organic search result pages he will first read your ‘ad’. Your ‘ad’ is your meta description of that page.

Each page is different and needs its own meta description. Consider it your Call to Action, your opportunity to sell your page in a few words.

Meta Descriptions & SEO

Search engines may no longer use the Meta Description Tags to determine rankings, so stuffing this tag with keywords is not helpful at all. What you should do instead is capatilise on the opportunity the tag gives you to sell yourself to your customer.

Writing a good meta description

Now that you know the meta description is like your free ad on google, you must make sure it will be an ad that sells. Make sure you follow these guidelines when you write your free Google ad;

1. use up to 160 characters
2. describe what that page is really about (make it short en enticing)
3. make it a call to action – encourage people to click on it (think.. why would I click on this?)
4. make sure its relevant to the search query and use relevant keywords in the text

Good luck writing your free google ad.