To Follow or Not To Follow? That is the question. Today we did some research on the nofollow meta tag around this question: “Will an external link to a trusted source look unnatural if I place a nofollow tag on the link?” I have some thoughts on this and have broken them up into two different areas: why you would link to a site without a nofollow tag, and why you would link to a site with the nofollow tag implemented.

1.) Why To Link Without A Nofollow:

When you want to pass link juice/power to a trusted domain. The reason you may want to do this is if the site you are linking to is going to link back to you (yes, some reciprocal links are good). This is very natural in the eyes of the search engines. It is when this process is done in extreme that the search engines have a problem with it. You (as the site owner) need to make sure you are comfortable with/trust the site you are linking too and you are making the conscious decision to pass them this trust from your site. If this is the case, that you do trust the site, I would recommend getting a link back from them to your site into the sections/category of your site you are trying to promote.

2.) Why To Link With A Nofollow:

Now, here are a couple of reasons to why you would want to add the tag on link from your site. One, you do not want to pass link power to a website for the reason that you do not want to promote that website. They maybe a competitor or you may not want the search engines to “associate” your website with theirs. Another reason could be that a site is so big that it will not benefit from your site linking to it and you would rather pass that link power to another site. This goes for your own internal site. You will want to add the nofollow tag to page of less importance (ie..contact forms, privacy policies, sitemap, etc.)

Concentrating your link power to a few trusted sources who will benefit from the extra links is a crucial part of SEO strategy and helps benefit your own site and other sites you link to.

I Think the Questions to Ask Yourself Are:

• Do I trust this site?
• Are they going to link back to me (or to another property of mine)?
• Do I want to be associated with this site in the eyes of the search engines?
• Do I want to help promote this site?
• Is this a very important page to my site (Internal)?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then you do not want to place the nofollow tag onto the site. If you answered “no” to any of these questions you may want to think about adding it.

No related posts.