Yahoo and no-follow links

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A very common question among those in the search engine optimization (SEO) field revolves around the question of no-follow links. A no follow link is a back-link to a website that the referring website has tagged as a no follow link. This no follow attribute signals to search engines that the link is real but should not be followed by the spiders, or crawlers. Many immediately think that these type of links do nothing to help your online presence.  But that is just non-sense. While you may not get all the “juice” from these links transferred to your website you will certainly increase your trust flow and show the search engines that you are a website that matters and provides user content that is really for the users and not just for some SEO back-link campaign.

Loren Baker wrote to Google, Yahoo and Ask and asked them point blank about no-follow links to help clear this subject up. Yahoo responded and said they do indeed index no-follow links and pass traffic through them. They do however not pass the anchor text and attribution over to the website being linked to. Below is the beautiful info-graphic he added to his article.

Loren Bakers info-graphic

What this basically means is Yahoo does indeed use no-follow links as part of their algorithms but it doesn’t hold the same weight for adding juice to your actual website as a normal back-link. So if you have the chance at receiving a no-follow link from places such as Wikipedia, Facebook etc then you absolutely should take them. But also remember all back-links are not created equal and you should not be trying to get every back-link you possibly can. That is some old black hat techniques that end up hurting your website rankings rather than helping them. Search engines main goal is to provide accurate and helpful search results for users inquiries. If you have a valuable site these search engines want to know about your site and want to display them proudly in their results. The better a search engine can provide answers and information to it’s users the more trust that company has and more people will use them, knowing they care about solving the problems rather than just displaying random pages with no useful user content.

If you are confused about back-links or would like to learn how your company can be found online then contact Cloudy Zebra SEO, a local Albany SEO agency.