When you’re building links for your website, you need to bear in mind that some sites use the nofollow attribute for external links. The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google about four years ago. Its purpose is to prevent any Pagerank from being passed to the site that is being linked to. This attribute was introduced in order to combat spam and the manipulation of Google’s algorithm.
Many social media sites and popular bloggers now routinely use the nofollow attribute. It’s not particularly helpful to have a nofollow link from an SEO perspective, so the only motive for having a nofollow link is to drive traffic to your site. As the main focus of our efforts is to increase our rankings in the search engines, I’d suggest avoiding nofollow links altogether.
A quick and easy way to spot a nofollow link is to download the NoDoFollow plugin for Firefox. Being able to visually see the highlighted nofollow links on the page is a great timesaver. You will note if you are using this plugin that my link to Wikipedia in the first paragraph is a followed link, whereas my second link to the Firefox plugin contains the nofollow attribute.
If you want to extract the link juice from a page, make sure that the link you wish to obtain will be a dofollow link. This way, you can be sure that it will help you achieve the rankings you desire for your chosen keyword(s).
Edit: Ironic, isn’t it, that this page which explains that nofollow links are no good for SEO, attracts the vast majority of the spam comments, which a) don’t get approved and b) if they were approved, would be nofollow.
Turning off comments now…damned spammers.
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