How to add Nofollow to a Link

One of the most common word which you will come across in the field of SEO is nofollow and dofollow. Link building is the crucial part of any successful SEO and we have already covered basics about Nofollow and Dofollow and here I will tell you how to add no-follow to any link. In this tutorial, we will learn why you should have nofollow and dofollow link and what kind of links should be nofollow. 

One of the most common misconception which I want you to get out of your head is, lots of dofollow links are bad. There is nothing wrong with Dofollow link, until you are linking to any reliable source. Infact, when I was learning about On-page SEO optimization, one thing which I have learned is adding link to a reliable and trustable source will help you to boost your ranking. Now, we will look into some aspect of nofollow links.

Why you need to add Nofollow Tag to any link?

One of the basic rule of SEO is giving more importance to important posts by keeping it Dofollow and keeping other links as nofollow. Now most basic question is what is dofollow. Dofollow links are links which we want Google to follow from our page and nofollow links are those links which we don’t want Google bot (Or any other search engine bots) to follow. Usually when ever we have to link to any bad domain, we use nofollow link attributes.

By default any WordPress blog or BlogSpot blog adds dofollow attribute when ever we add any link. Now, when we are linking to any site and we don’t want to pass the link juice, we use nofollow link attribute. This will help to transfer the link juice to correct domain.

More over, when you are linking to affiliate products, any spam site for any reasons, make sure to use Nofollow tag attributes. Though, some time back Google specified that, Google has started ignoring Nofollow tags, but still SEO guru believes, it’s a good practice to use nofollow link attributes for such domains, when it’s not a quality source. For the info, many search engine bots started following nofollow links but they don’t use such links for ranking.

How to add Nofollow Attributes to a link?

By default your link look like this <a href="http://www.shoutmeloud.com">How to Blog</a>

To make it nofollow, simply add an attribute Nofollow to the link <a href="http://www.shoutmeloud.com" rel="nofollow">How to blog</a>

When writing in WordPress or Blogger, you can go to Edit HTML mode and add rel=” nofollow” infront of links to make it nofollow.

For WordPress, there are many plugins which does this task for you. Many plugins also help you to make all external links as nofollow, but I don’t find it as White has SEO technique. One should not be afraid of passing link juice to any reliable source.

Usually to maintain the link juice we keep our blog comments and external ad links as nofollow. You can use plugin like Robots meta to keep comments and ads link as nofollow. For internal links, I would suggest keep them as dofollow (Which stays by default) as it will help search engine bots to crawl more pages on your site.

If you have lots of outbound link from single page. I will suggest to keep atleast those links nofollow which doesn’t add value to search engine. So that you will not pass your link juice to all of the links. Specially your advertisement links and affiliate links.

To Your Success!

- Christer B Herou