No Follow, Might Follow, Do Follow
The “No Follow” attribute (rel=”nofollow”) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments due to comment spam. As time passed, websites began using this in other areas, such as text links, to ensure their pagerank (PR) was not being leaked to other sites and to stop search engines indexing external pages.
Whilst he “No Follow” attribute may stop PR leakage, links are still counted towards the overall backlink count, which is what you should be targetting. In my post Off Site SEO, I stated “I’ve found building relevant backlinks works a treat when trying to rank well in the search engines.”
Regardless of whether these links are “No Follow” or not, they’ll still be counted. Sure it would be beneficial if they were “Do Follow”, but it is not the deciding factor.
Here are some important notes regarding the “No Follow” issue…
1. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves. In short, it doesn’t look good.
2. Search Engines follow NoFollow. Both Yahoo and Google have been known to count NoFollow links as backlinks in SiteExplorer. Proof from Search Engine Journal and Jon Warass.
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