Recently on our website, we wrote a blog called “What Are Backlinks in SEO and Why Are They Important?” In that post, we mentioned different types of backlinks, one of which is no-follow backlinks.
After reading that post, you may have been wondering “Are no-follow links useless in SEO” or “Do no-follow links even matter?” If you have questions like these, don’t worry. We will answer them in this article.
What exactly is a no-follow link?
A no-follow link is identified with a rel=“nofollow” HTML tag. In contrast to do-follow links, no-follow links don’t pass on link juice to the linked website.
Link juice refers to the authority of the website. In other words, when we say that link juice is not transferred, we mean that the authority from the linking website is not passed on to the linked website.
In more technical terms, when there is a no-follow tag on a link, it basically tells the web crawlers that they should not follow the link and visit the linked website. That way, since the crawlers don’t come to the website, there is no passing on of authority.
Are no-follow links useless?
No, no-follow links are not useless. Even though they don’t pass on link juice, they do provide other benefits.
A lot of times, when you collaborate with other websites on the internet, they will give a link to your site but either with a “sponsored” tag or with a “nofollow” tag. Even if you get a no-follow tag, you can still look forward to a benefit, which we’ve mentioned in the heading below.
What benefit do no-follow links provide?
The benefit of no-follow links is that they help drive clicks and traffic to your website.
Even though they don’t give link juice, they still allow readers to visit the linked website. In other words, if you get a no-follow link from a popular source like Hubspot, it will help you by directly getting you clicks and traffic from the readers.
The reason for that is simple. When people read content on popular and reliable websites, they likewise trust the sources that they link to. That way, even if a website gets a no-follow link from a reliable online source, it can lead to people clicking on said link and navigating to the website.
How do you know if a link is no-follow or do-follow?
You can check if a link is no-follow or do-follow by using the Inspect Elementoption. Here is what you have to do:
- Open the webpage where the link is placed
- Find the link in the text and select it with your mouse cursor
- Press right-click and select the “Inspect” option from the drop-down menu
- In the menu on the right, a snippet of code will be highlighted. This is the code related to the link. In this code, you will see the tags on the link. If it contains the words “nofollow,” then it means the link is no-follow.
Here is an image showing the code for a no-follow link:
Final Thoughts
And that is all for today.
In this post, we’ve looked at what benefit no-follow links provide. They help drive clicks and traffic to your website. If you are able to get such a link from a high-authority website, you should go for it by all means.
Backlinks are an important part of SEO. As long as they are not toxic and spammy, they can help your website in some way or the other.