Do NoFollow Links Carry Link Juice

• Tweet

• Tweet

This is probably one of the biggest question that webmaster never get a proper answer to. Ever since its creation in 2005, webmasters always wondered if links with the “rel=nofollow” attribute help for your rankings. This has become one of the main methods to tell Google not to follow certain links on a website.

But the “nofollow” attribute can be useful, for example if you wish to “tighten” your internal linking and keep all of your web authority focused certain pages. This attribute is also used by default in many CMS platforms such as Drupal and WordPress, which makes it the most commonly used outgoing link attribute on the net.  There are many myths and theories revolving around this attribute and this article is going to shed some light on all these issues.

Its Origins

Back in 2005, there was a big blog spamming problem that affected a lot of Google’s SERPs. Why you may ask? Well like we all know, link building is the main way of getting ranked higher on seach engines, so people would go on blogs and just spam them with irrelevant and useless comments just to get a link back to their website. Unfortunately, this greatly affected the SERPs and made them somewhat irrelevant to the queries. For this reason, Google’s Web Spam team developed and patented this attribute.

What Is It Used For

There are many different reasons and scenarios where the “rel=nofollow” attribute should be used but I will only be giving you the main ones.

• Linking to Websites: If you are linking to another website from yours, you might want to add the “nofollow” tag in order to keep the authority on your page and not pass any link juice. It is also essential to add this tag when linking to websites you don’t necessarily trust.
• RSS FeedBurner: Using a NoFollow attribute on your RSS FeedBurner link is very important because it keeps your link juice in your web page and also it helps to prevent duplicate content.
• Internal Linking: You should use a NoFollow attribute whenever you’re linking pages of your website that are not important. This will help concentrate your link juice to the pages that need it most. I suggest using this attribute when you’re linking to pages such as “Contact Us”, “Register”, “Login”, etc. Here is Matt Cutts take on this issue.

What It Isn’t Used For

Many people think that by using the “rel=nofollow” attribute, they are blocking the search engine from accessing some content or preventing it from being indexed. This is totally wrong and unlike most people think, the search engine actually follows those links and takes a look at what is on the other side of the link but doesn’t give any authority. This means that the bot will crawl and notice the links but it won’t give them any weight.

If you would like to block the search engine to access or index certain pages or content of your website, the use of a Robots Exclusion Protocol (better known as robots.txt) is best. Actually this and the Meta Robots are the only ways to give specific orders to the search engine.

Now For The Big Question

The time has come to answer the question that has been lurking in the mind of webmasters. Does Google give any kind of weight or passes link juice to inbound links with the “rel=nofollow” attribute? The answer is no, Google doesn’t give any weight to inbound links with this attribute. Why? Well the whole concept of this attribute was to help search engines block spammy links from untrusted and unsecure websites. Also, it helped blog owners clean up their comments because they were all filled of outgoing links that weren’t relevant to the content. Users would comment irrelevant things just to get a inbound link pointing to their website.

Another thing I could add is that the rel=nofollow attribute is also used to retain link juice and Page Rank to a certain webpage. So it makes sense that Google won’t give any kind of link juice or ranking weight to those links. Even though the search engines will crawl and index them, he won’t give any kind of ranking power.