Are You Following Me - NoFollow for beginners

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or are just starting out online then you surely have heard some mention of do follow, no follow, pagerank, link juice etc.  It’s a subject that has created both quite a bit of controversy and a TON of discussion.  It’s also a topic that newbies might not understand so we will attempt to answer your questions in this article.

Pagerank is a “ranking” that Google gives to your site to show it’s authority online, a measure of how useful it is to readers.  They measure the authority by counting the number of sites that “link” to it, with the justification that one wouldn’t link to something that had no value or didn’t provide a service.   The higher the pagerank of the incoming site then the more “linkjuice” is given to the receiving site, thus increasing its own pagerank.  

On the surface this seems like an ok system but it didn’t take long for the intuitive site owners out there to figure out that they could make extra income selling links on their site to those who wanted to increase their backlink count.   If they owned a high PR site then they could make a TIDY sum of money selling links to those who wanted PR.  An entire industry was born around “paid” links.

The problem that Google has with this is paid for links do not necessarily mean a site is any good or has value to readers.  It simply means that the site has enough money to ”buy” enough links to garner pagerank.    This is not acceptable to Google and they began a campaign last year to punish those who violated the spirit of the rules.   They dropped the pagerank significantly of any site that they deemed was selling links or in many cases even paid reviews as well.

This didn’t sit well with Bloggers as this was a significant amount of income to some of them.  Google became evil overnight.

This leads us to the birth of the “NoFollow” attribute.   In a nutshell this is a code that your site puts on your links that is called NoFollow that basically instructs Google not to transfer any pagerank juice to the receiving site.  This effectively killed (or is still killing) the paid link industry.  

The incentive to either buy or sell links is gone as Google will punish you both ways.  “NoFollow” became the standard and is in fact the standard setup on Wordpress blogs, your links are all classified as NoFollow unless you specify otherwise, most commonly via a Plug  In.

In my next article we will discuss another aspect of the NoFollow issue concerning Bloggers who are misleading people in order to entice them to post on their blog.  Stay tuned as we will also show you how to check if a link is Follow or NoFollow.

Don’t miss it.