Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea.
Today's conversation is what is a nofollow link. It's a pretty simple concept today, but it's actually really important to know what a nofollow link is in the long term scheme of doing SEO campaign. But because this is Zupo's SEO Talk And Tea, I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have this tea set that... It's actually not a tea set. I guess it's a gift tea... It's not a set. It's a set of tea bags though. So if I open this up, I've already had most of them but it was a box full of different teas that was given to me by a friend. My friend Francis. She's a great entrepreneur and friend of mine, she recently got married and was gifted this tea but she doesn't really drink tea.
So she went ahead thought that I might enjoy it more. So this specific tea that we're having today is called a luk on tea. To be honest, I had no idea what that is. I actually had to look it up this morning. So this is the first one I've ever trying it. But the best way I can explain it, what I've read is it's like a fermented Pu'Er, so a Pu'Er is fermented tea. So luk on I guess is like a sister or brother of Pu'Er tea. So I'm kind of excited to try it. So again, thank you Francis. If you're watching this, I appreciate the gift and I appreciate you being part of the Zupo's SEO Talk and Tea.
But let's go ahead and get brewing and get talking. So, the conversation again was what is a nofollow link? So the reason why this was important is because one of the main pillars of SEO is link-buildings and driving referring domains to your website.
Now not all links are created the same. I made a video about that in terms of the authority of different links. There's actually another layer, which is not all links actually pass value. And so what that means is there are links that exist that when Google reads them, they are coded so that they say, "Hey, I know I'm looking to this website, but I'm not endorsing, nor do I want to give any value to the other website. I am merely mentioning them, but I don't want to pass any value." Right? And if you're wondering why someone might want to do that, well for example, if you're writing about a spammy website or you're writing about a website that you want to expose that you don't want to be associated with, but you want people to be aware of it, you don't want to drive a link over there and then have Google think that you want to be associated with them.
That wasn't really what you want. You want Google to know, "Hey, I'm referencing them, but I'm not assigning them any value." So that's the importance of a nofollow link is that that's where it started from. Now the importance of where it comes into SEO is that there's a lot of links out there that you build that actually are nofollow. So the common example is social media. A lot of people think they're building links and social media, but actually social media is automatically... Everything is nofollowed. So Google doesn't assign any value to any links built on social media websites. That includes Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. So if you're thinking about hacking the system and building a buttload of links on a social media, that will work because they're nofollow and nofollow, again, does not pass value.
So there's other areas where a lot of blogs will just automatically nofollow all links. And there's many different reasons why and misconceptions, but we're not really about to go into that. The important thing is you want to build follow links, which are the opposite of nofollow. So the best way to understand is nofollow passes no value, and a regular link that passes value. It's called a follow link. So generally when you're building links, you want to find follow links that will drive value back to your site. Google has recently said that they do use nofollow links to some degree of just hints for the ranking algorithm, but it is still seen that follow links are orders of made to more valuable than a nofollow link. If you can grab a nofollow link, go ahead.
You might as well. But if you had a choice, go for the follow link. So in that case, what you'll find is that a lot of low quality sites pass nofollow links. These are directory sites or sites that willingly give links out. Well because they give so many links out, they're going to nofollow a lot of them because Google sees it that if you send out too many links, sometimes they think that you're a link farm and they'll ban you from Google. So a lot of sites will nofollow all their links to clarify that. So when you're building links, what you can do is you can actually go into the code. View page source or view inspects on Chrome and see the code. The [Inaudible 00:04:25] code for the link will generally, if it says nofollow somewhere in that code, if it's a nofollow link. If it doesn't say nofollow anywhere in there, it is a follow link. There's a lot of great Chrome plugins that I actually use to just quickly see. It'll automatically annotate an entire page and tell you what's nofollow, what's follow. A lot of them exist. You can just do a quick Google search and find them.
I'll probably just link the one I use in the show notes, but going back to what we're talking about, what is and nofollow link, it's a link that passes no value. So when you're building campaigns, ensure that you have a really strong mix of follow links. If you have too many nofollow links, it's not going to pass much value and all the work you're going to be doing isn't going to be really paid off. So ensure that you are building follow links back to your website. And generally where this comes into play is if you're considering writing or contributing to three different publications and two of them are nofollow and one of them is a follow, I always go on the follow up because you want follow links. That's a good example of where this would come into play.
So hopefully that was valuable. You need to know what a nofollow link is to be able to do some good link-building campaigns, and it's all about just using the right tools and knowing what is a nofollow link and where to find them. So hopefully when you're doing your own link-building campaigns, try to go for the follow links, not the nofollow links, but if you can get both, just get both. It doesn't really matter.
Overall though, hopefully you guys found that valuable. If you liked the video today and you found what I said valuable, please like and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon. And we're going to go do a live taste test of this. Today is a really hot day and I have to brew this at a hundred degrees Celsius, and I believe right now it's almost getting to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit where I'm at. So it's really hot. I'm drinking a hot tea, but hey, let's do this taste test.
Really hot. Ow. That's good. It's fragrant. That is good. Just really hot.