NoFollow DoFollow Links Arghhh! (In Response to Erlene)

4.2K followers

3 years ago

You’re lucky!! This blog post isn’t that long (less than 650 words I believe).

I was just responding to Erlene’s recent question, but then thought I would share my answer with the community as a whole.

It’s something that gets asked over-and-over again, so I guess it’s nice to have a reference point.

Erlene’s question:

Can Someone Explain How to Fix "No Follow" Attributes?

MY RESPONSE:

Hi Erlene,

Firstly, your wording has confused me a little here, i.e. "outgoing internal links".

Are you simply saying that these are internal links to other articles on your website?

If so, these should NEVER be "nofollow".

Basically, "NoFollow" means that you don't wish to pass any page authority to the article that you're linking to.

You always want to pass page authority from one article to another on your OWN WEBSITE.

Nofollow can also mean, "I do NOT fully support the content that I am linking to as I cannot verify whether this person is an expert".

You would add nofollow when linking EXTERNALLY to a non-authority website, or a website that you don't know very well.

If you're linking to a well-known or authority website there is NO NEED to add a nofollow attribute (the hope is that you leave an external link as DOfollow then they may do the same for you - this can help with rankings depending on the authority of the website that links back to you).

You would also add nofollow if you can potentially make monetary gain from the next page that an external link is pointing to, i.e. an affiliate link.

You can simply mark this as "nofollow" or you can go one extra step and mark it as "sponsored" AS WELL.

John Mueller @Google has now confirmed that no-one will be penalised for not adding the "sponsored" to an affiliate link (basically nofollow covers this anyway).

You would also add a nofollow if you externally link to a forum or Q&A site.

Once more, this is because you cannot verify the expertise of the respondent.

This is typically done by adding the UGC attribute.

UGC = User Generated Content, i.e. forums, communities, question and answer websites, linking to a WA blog.

That's nofollow/dofollow in a nutshell.

However, as I've said, you NEVER want to nofollow an internal link.

Every article you ever write on your website will generate its own individual page rank.

So, some articles will have a higher page rank than others, i.e. some articles will have more AUTHORITY than others.

Therefore, any internal links from high authority articles will carry a lot of weight in potentially helping you to rank your other articles.

Case in point, I think my top performing article on the site in my profile will hit 12,000 views for December (it currently has over 11,243 views as of yesterday).

It ranks at number one in Google for 12 different keywords.

This article has AUTHORITY, much more authority than an article I wrote yesterday and is yet to rank.

If I link from the high-performing article to the new article and leave the link attribute alone (so, NOT nofollow, this will be known as DOfollow) there is a good chance that my new article will rank quickly because an authority article is linking to it.

If all the nofollow and dofollow linking is a little confusing then just do the following:

If you link internally to an article on YOUR website then you don’t need to do anything. Your internal links will automatically be DOFOLLOW.

If you link externally to an article on ANOTHER website then add the nofollow attribute. You don’t need to do anything else, as nofollow covers every eventuality.

Hope that helps.

Partha