I’ve been reading up on nofollow on various websites and I’m not sure I understand it completely.
Does nofollow negatively affect backlinks?
How can not adding nofollow affect your site negatively?
The phrase “link juice” comes up a lot in discussions about nofollow. What is link juice?
P.S. - If you’re going to redirect me to a page where my questions have already been “answered” can it please be a page where they really are answered and not just a debate thread where people can’t agree on an answer? I’ve seen that a lot today. People claim the answer can be found by searching for it (using the search feature) but every thread on the subject ends up with people disagreeing on how relevent nofollow is.
[font=calibri]“Nofollow” means that search engines ignore those links.
Times when it is a good idea to add “nofollow” (ie not adding it could harm your site) are when you have links to restricted areas that search bots won’t be able to access, and when you are into the murky world of user-generated content, and you don’t want to be held responsible for whatever links your users might choose to splatter all over their comments.
“Link juice” is an informal term that describes how much importance Google ascribes to links. The idea is that if you have lots of good, authoritative links flowing into your page, you have a certain amount of credit (juice) that is shared out among all the links out from your page. Some people think that if you mark all links you don’t want to promote (including all external links) as “nofollow”, that means that all that juice is just shared out among the links that are left, meaning Google considers them as more important than if you had shared the juice out among fifty other links. Fortunately, that analogy is way too simplistic, and Google’s algorithm is far more complicated and sophisticated than that.
It really isn’t worth putting “nofollow” on links unless they are in user-generated content, or possibly to restricted areas that you don’t want Google to waste time on. Don’t put it on external links that you have chosen to include, and don’t put it on links to less important pages like your terms and conditions. Just let Google go wherever it wants, and let it figure out what’s important and what’s not. It’s good at that. Trying to channel it down particular routes if that isn’t the way it wants to go will just upset it and is more likely to do you harm in the long run.[/font]
A simplification that is probably closer to being right is to look at the “link juice” being split equally between all the links but with that assigned to the nofollow links being thrown away rather than passed on. This is also too simplistic but is going to be closer to the truth as Google don’t want people manipulating how much “link joice” a given link can provide by applying nofollow to other links as that is not what nofollow is for.
Just to add some clarification about user-generated content. This refers to things like forum posts, visitors’ comments, user reviews, etc. The reason to add nofollow to links in this type of content is to discourage spammy links. People will always try to post links to their own sites wherever they can, in the hope that this will give them an SEO benefit. The theory is that by adding nofollow to these links, the SEO benefit disappears, and people will therefore be less likely to do to. In practice, there are many people who don’t understand this point, and will still try to post spammy links.
On a more general point, I think the best advice is not to worry too much about nofollow. If your site supports user-generated content, and if your system allows links in such content to be automatically nofollow, then that’s fine. But in other respects, just treat all your outgoing links (both internal and external) as normal links, and only worry about nofollow if you have a special reason for doing so.
No actually the nofllow will not give the page rank benifits and hence will not get the link juice. Apart from that you will have not effect by nofollow links.
Giving so much dofollow links to the same site on single page will effect your serp while same is not for nofollow. The dofflow link is that allow to get link juice that it encounter the link to rank the page same is opposite for nofollow. Accessive of something is bad but you can give nofollow to many. While this generate traffic but not helps in ranking in search engines. So negative affect on website.
link juice is the weightage given by the search engines in term to rank for the particular keyword that anchored though that link. It is totaly dependen on the alogorith mof the search engine while in GOogle page rank is a factor that determine the link juice.
no follow is a anchor attribute you use when you want to put a link to another website on your website but do not want to transfer link juice
here is what matt cutt says about the no follow
“Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
