Nofollow Links and Backlinks - Does “Nofollow” Hurt Your Site Backlinks?

Yes, you heard it right! It is helpful to increase organic traffic to your site if blog and/or website has high Page Rank (PR). It will increase your Alexa traffic rank also. Let me give you a brief description about the 'nofollow' link.

“Nofollow” is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of Spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

Okay I will suggest take a look at this website www.americanfireinc.com. This site has about 25+ links on its homepage because of the categories links generation. Most of its links have been created through nofollow links, still the website has managed to create 25+ backlinks and a good Alexa traffic rank (670,208) as well. Let’s look at some of its screenshots given below.

The above screenshot is of americanfireinc.com in alexa.com. You can see the arrow mark indicating one outbound link from solarglazingmag.com acquired by americanfireinc.com.

The above screen shot represents backlinks overview of www.americanfireinc.com. The Link type indicates that the weblink solarglazingmag.com as 'nofollow' and the PR - last column indicates PageRank (PR 3). Although the ‘nofollow’ links are technically less valuable than regular 'dofollow' links, still such links help to create backlinks for your site.

While dofollow backlinks obviously give you some link juice and help in the search engine ratings, a nofollow backlink gives you the following advantages:

• Human traffic: You can still get traffic from ‘nofollow’ links. You won’t get traffic from search engines, but from the websites themselves. If you have good backlinks, this can be very beneficial even though the links are ‘nofollow’.

• Search engines still follow: Although links are deemed ‘nofollow’, search engines will still follow the link and index your page in some cases. Most won’t let the backlink impact your search engine rankings or PageRank, though.

• It doesn’t hurt: ‘Nofollow’ links can’t hurt your website. Search engines won’t let them impact your rank (for better or worse).

If you have any question, please contact surendra@dartconsulting.co.in