Printable View
Now that I'm actually putting affiliate links in my blog (and hoping one day to actually earn a little money off them), I need to understand more about follow and no follow links. Frankly, I don't understand them at all - I just remember reading somewhere along the way that this was important stuff to avoid a google slap.
Can you guys educate me, please?
Jeanette
There are others out there that know more than me but as far as I understand Google's 'no-follow' tag recommendation is generally used in reference to blog comment posting to comments and signature links, not to the original posts.
Links made from original blog posts will still be followed, indexed and weighted by the search engines.
An understanding I have is that for a site to get page rank, the more links pointing to it gives it authority in the eyes of Google, the more links you have linking away from your page ' Bleeds' page authority.
Instead of linking to another site like this:
<a href="http://www.\anotherdomain.com">anotherdomain</a>,
a link using the 'no-follow' tag will look like this:
<a href="http://www.anotherdomain.com" rel="nofollow">anotherdomain</a>.
I think the Google slap you refer to was a clean up of sites that had non relevant content ie adsense sites with no other content then links.
The no follow attribute is commonly used for "PageRank Sculpting" - an advanced SEO strategy. You don't run the risk of a "google slap" by not using this link attribute, so no major worries there.
For some reading on the topic, just Google "no follow attribute" and/or "no follow tag".
Even though it is named "no follow" the search engines do actually follow the link. The only real use is that it's not meant to pass Google PageRank from your page to the page you're linking to. But that seems to be up for debate, as to whether that's actually the case or not.