What are the benefits of nofollow backlinks? If you see its advantages, they are not junk anymore. In fact, they can be valuable in some ways. This article is inspired by the fact that so many people contact us with the intent to do guest blogging on this site but the moment they read the guidelines and are informed that we will give only nofollow links, most of them are losing interest because they were looking for or dofollow links only from high domain authority websites. Nofollow links interest no one!
What are nofollow links?
These are the links in which the rel=nofollow tag is applied, which basically tells Google that this link is not endorsed and should not be considered valuable for search engine ranking purposes.
<a href="https://link.com" rel="nofollow">Link</a>
While most links are dofollow, nofollow is applied whenever website owners feel they are not able to judge spam. Mostly this happens in cases of user-generated content like comments and guest blogging, where it seems safer to add nofollow links rather than get your own website penalized by search engines for link spamming and selling dofollow links.
Nofollow Link Benefits
On the brighter side, there are some advantages of nofollow links which you must know.
1. Get Free Site Traffic
Obviously, if you have a link linking to another website and people are reading that highly popular article, there is a high chance that people will click on that link if it seems relevant and useful and has the anchor text that is exciting enough.
Readers browsing for useful content do not care if the link was dofollow or nofollow. They don’t know anyways and you cannot find out unless you see the page HTML code or use SEO toolbars to check the link follow the status.
Thus any highly popular page generating significant traffic will generate significant traffic for outbound links going out of that website!
2. Exposure to higher authority websites
How many of us can get an article in the New York Times? And if you do, would you not be proud of it?
The very fact that the article was published on a reputed website with a backlink to your website I think is enough evidence that the higher-reputation website thought your content was good enough to be put up on their website. A link back to your site is a common courtesy to identify the author and give credit.
You get exposure for your content to a large number of readers which might get you many more social media followers if they like your content and as they browse through to look at your other writings on your site, just to become long-term readers and a part of your community.
3. Nofollow links are now a hint for Google
Google’s team recently revisited the following ability of nofollow links and they said that Google will consider even nofollow links as a hint in rankings. This also means that they will continue to crawl these nofollow links although they might still not attach as much relevance for endorsement and search engine rankings.
In most cases, the move to a hint model won’t change the nature of how we treat such links. We’ll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes.
4. Nofollow links and your SEO profile
Have you not seen nofollow links in your Google Search Console reports? Just like Google crawls your site, every website is crawled by hundreds of bots every day.
If you look at many of the SEO backlink tools like ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, etc, you will find that most of them track the status of nofollow as well as dofollow links, with how many links are lost or found every day. They are noticed and crawled.
If you assess any backlink report, it’s clear that SEO experts monitor your nofollow or dofollow and assess how many nofollow and dofollow links you got over time.
Many of these SEO tools also take into consideration your backlink profile and what percentage or ratio of dofollow vs nofollow links you have in your backlink profile, which is an important factor in determining the quality of your backlinks! If you have 100% dofollow links, would it not looks suspicious?
So stop worrying so much about dofollow vs nofollow and concentrate more on writing great content. The Dofollow links will follow.