Follow or Nofollow Links?

Anyone involved in offsite optimisation will be familiar with linkbuilding. It is a time consuming, very rewarding and sometimes downright frustrating process.

You will spend a lot of time linkbuilding, just as much time checking whether they have been published and a fair amount checking whether those published are follow or nofollow links.

In simple terms, applying the nofollow attribute to a link instructs Google to disregard that link when awarding PageRank. Applying the follow attribute instructs Google to take that link into consideration. While there is a school of thought that a nofollow link will still be of benefit to you when it comes to rankings, follow links are undoubtedly more powerful.

To give my links the best possible chance of being followed, I always add rel=”follow” to the code. A lot of the time, a website will simply replace it with nofollow but in one recent case, the website did something different. Instead of removing my rel=”follow”, it simply added in rel=”nofollow”, like so:

<a rel=”follow” href=http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>example</a>

I had never come across this before and I found it quite an interesting issue. What would the spiders do? Search engine spiders will follow by default, unless instructed not to but what happens when they receive contradictory information? I had a look into it and in the event of receiving contradictory signals, the search engine spiders are free to do as they wish. Exactly how the decision is made proved a little harder to track down, although several possibilities exist:

- The spiders revert to their default behaviour, which is to follow the link
- The spiders obey the first command to appear in the code
- The spiders look at the link relationships on the rest of the websiteand made a decision based on that

For more information on linkbuilding and other offsite optimisation techniques, contact 4Ps Marketing.

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