The Official Blog of AREA203 Digital

Once you know how to use NoFollow tags properly, you can start using them to your advantage to gain other valuable links and natural traffic. But before we get into the meat of this topic, let’s take a minute to answer a simple yet profound question.
 

How Do Search Engines Work?

 
Here are the cold, hard facts about how a search engines works. When more people link to a reputable website, that website gains more authoritative buzz. The more buzz it gains, the more popular it becomes. As it becomes more popular, it gains more relevance. As its relevance increases, so does its ranking.

This is Google’s basic formula for ranking through their search philosophy, which has always been serving the most relevant result from the most authoritative site. However, we all know this isn’t necessarily the case; “spammers” and “link builders” are always looking for ways to manipulate the search engines.

When you do a regular Google search, you’re not searching the Internet. In reality, you’re searching Google’s index of the Internet, which is massive. It handles billions, if not trillions of domains, all their web pages, and all the images and files associated with each page. Not to mention AdWords—Google’s money maker. And let’s not forget that your result is sent back within half a second. The bulk of this work can be attributed to Googlebot.
 

Who (Or What) Is Googlebot?

 
In my first post, SEO Blogging for Beginners, I explained how Google reads your blog content and why your keywords are, in relation to website code, a BIG deal. It’s because 99.99% of the time, a human eye is not reviewing a website. A computer program called a spider, crawler, bot, (or officially speaking, Googlebot) reads and indexes websites based on how the code and content are laid out.

From there, the bots will create more bots to FOLLOW those links, then create even more bots that FOLLOW all the links on those other sites, and so on. These bots report back to Google’s index, which collects, processes, and organizes targeted keyword terms a user might type to find a relevant webpage. This process is never-ending and is always adapting to the tactics spammers and link builders use for manipulation. These bots know more about our behavior than we do. For example, while Googlebot reads this page, it will visit the links I have below.

www.cnn.com
www.espn.com
www.cricinfo.com
www.engadet.com
www.techcrunch.com
 

What About Smappers and Content Farms?

 
So I just sent Googlebot to those sites. But what about spam, content farms, horrible directories, and popular social sites like Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia (the authoritative sites that millions of people visit on a daily basis)? I could easily use these to my advantage if I was a website owner (or SEO marketer).

Trust me, when I say this system was exposed long ago. The solution was easy. It’s called NoFollow. Google introduced this tag in early 2005; Yahoo and Bing quickly adapted to the new guideline. This one small code also helps with the flow of PageRank (Google’s way of determining which links get special treatment), but that’s for another topic.

For example, a black-hat SEO marketer cannot get a website ranked or even indexed by just spamming links on Twitter, Facebook or Wikipedia because all of those links are NoFollow. That doesn’t mean a regular user can’t see them or get hassled into clicking on them (because that’s the ultimate point with spam).

That also doesn’t mean all those links are spam. Most of them are perfectly legitimate. If it’s great content, someone might show a friend or email the link to the entire staff. If it is spam or uninformative junk, a person usually clicks off. Your Google Account, Google Chrome, and the Google Toolbar will notify Googlebot (or another top secret Google factor, depending on your privacy settings) that someone immediately clicked off the site or decided to spend some time to visit more pages (and kept coming back for more).
 

The Impact of NoFollow

 
We can clearly see a distinguished line between popular sites meant for social networking, and websites that only exist to give out a ‘follow’ link. EzineArticles.com used to be a haven for SEO professionals to find a ‘follow’ link until early this year. After Google’s recent algorithm change, many of these sites implemented a NoFollow attribute to user-generated links to regain their lost authority. Now, stop and think of all the sites out there with bad information. Their sites sole purpose is to automatically generate revenue through Google AdSense from whatever content they have on hand. Some website owners quickly realized that the market for backlinks was enormous. Then webmasters created sites devoted to gaining a Follow link through a user, minimizing all effort to keep a clean, moderated, and informative site.
 

How Do You Use A NoFollow Tag?

 
The NoFollow tag is a code on the backend of a website. For the AREA203 Digital URL, It would be written as:

<a href=”http://www.area203.com” rel=”nofollow”>AREA203 Digital</a>

This link is still readable and recognizable to the bots. If the search engines decide that I, as an author or area2oh3.com, as a website, has trust and authority within the user community, the bots will still follow the link and give the same outgoing URL some rank within the search results. If it’s known spam, or left by a new or unpopular user, bots will avoid it completely until the authority is built.
 

The Benefits of NoFollow

 
There are a few advantages to using a NoFollow tag, but the main purpose is selling advertising space on a website. For a very long time, paying for links was an effective SEO tactic. Google realized this and decided not to give out ranking to people who pay for Follow links. They did that for the regular user who needs to find relevant information instead of a marketer forcing irrelevant information to the top. Now websites can clearly distinguish between adverts and links put in place for ranking purposes.

Another benefit of NoFollow is user interaction and user experience. A NoFollow tag allows a user to post a link without fear of being denied. At the same time, spammers can’t ruin the social fun because they usually avoid NoFollow websites. It’s almost worthless for them. (It’s just a waste of time.)

A website that utilizes the NoFollow tag in areas known for spam, such as the comments section, can theoretically gain trust and authority from the search engines. The tag is a great way to let the search engines know that you’re here to promote great content and a great Internet experience and not for ranking manipulation purposes.

Last but not least are the loads of natural traffic and potential conversions. As more people continue to socially interact online, there’s a better chance of finding relevant information from someone you trust. Think of all the informative and useful sites you found through blog comments, Twitter and Facebook. Now think of all the emails, tweets, posts and comments that are sent to you by friends and coworkers. Natural traffic is natural traffic, and that’s a win-win situation if we all stick to that goal.

→ Jig Patel, SEO Specialist, AREA203 Digital