Importance of Nofollow Links in Link Building

You might be familiar with the terms nofollow and dofollow in regards to backlinks. Nofollow links DO matter in the world of SEO and link building.

What Are Nofollow & Dofollow Links?

    Dofollow: These links tell search engines to “follow” them and pass link juice to help improve a sites ranking.

    Nofollow: These links tell search engines the exact opposite of dofollow and that is to not “follow” them and that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target URL. Google says “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”

The Benefits of Nofollow Links in Link Building

As I mentioned above, nofollow links do have value in many of their own ways and should not be shied away from. We all know how hard good, white-hat link building has become over the last 5-10 years, and rightfully so. So passing up a good, quality, RELEVANT link just because its nofollowed doesn’t make much sense and here are some of the reasons why:

    Referral traffic: 

A well placed nofollow link, or any link for that matter, has GREAT potential for referral traffic, which leads to...

    Leads: 

If you get a link that drives tons of traffic to your site then your leads will subsequently increase too, which leads to...

    Revenue: 

Depending on if your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is up to snuff, all the extra traffic and increased leads should then convert into more paying customers

    Organic Growth: 

This one could be up for debate, but that all depends what side of the argument you’re on. I firmly believe that Google does follow nofollow links, at least somewhat. This would make them one of their MANY ranking factors for organic growth. There isn’t ONE golden ranking factor that will shoot you to the top of page 1, but when you put all of them together is when you really start seeing some great improvements. If you were wondering about any of these ranking factors that Google looks at, here’s an amazing list of all 200 of them that Brian Dean @ Backlinko put together, kudos on all of that work Brian!

    Diversify Your Backlink Portfolio: 

Adding a little diversification is only going to help you in the long run. You don’t want to have a backlink profile with all of the same kind of dofollow links from only a few domains. If you do, chances are Google will notice and might think it’s a bit unnatural, and you don’t want to get on their bad side. Just like your financial portfolio, diversification is key.

If you are getting increases in traffic, leads, and hopefully customers, as well as seeing organic growth in rankings and traffic all from some nofollow links, then it is absolutely important in SEO link building.