Nofollow Link Sign

If you have been trying to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for some time chances are you have heard about dofollow and nofollow links. But what are they anyway, and how do you find out if a link is dofollow or nofollow? And how does this affect your sites search engine rankings?

Lets start with the background.

The original idea with nofollow was to reduce comment spam on blogs. In 2005 Google’s Mat Cutts and Blogger’s Jason Shellen proposed a way to address the problem with spam comments and the result was the nofollow attribute that can be added to links in a webpage.

This makes no sense to you if you don’t know what a link looks like in HTML, so lets look at what a simple link looks like in the HTML source code of a webpage.

<a href=”http://www.simonbyholm.com”>Simon’s SEO Blog</a>

That’s the link HTML for a simple link pointing to this blog’s homepage with the anchor text “Simon’s SEO Blog”. This is what it will look like in a webpage:

Simon’s SEO Blog

Ok, so what about the nofollow and dofollow stuff you were talking about?

So what about it?

Here’s what the same link will look like when it has the nofollow tag added:

<a href=”http://www.simonbyholm.com” rel=”nofollow”>Simon’s SEO Blog</a>

Look at that! I added the text rel=”nofollow” to the link. That’s what a  nofollow link looks like. Learn to recognize and stay away from these kind of links, they are of little value for SEO.

What the nofollow tag does, is it tells Google to disregard the link and to not give any link juice to the target page. Specifically nofollow links does not pass PageRank to the target page! This means you should not pay for links from directories or other sources if they carry the nofollow tag.

So what about dofollow, what’s that? I hear you asking.

Dofollow is the opposite of nofollow. It’s a standard link with no “nofollow” tag added. A link that will pass link juice and that is good for your search engine rankings if it points your way. It’s just easier to call it a “dofollow link” than to say “a link with no nofollow tag”, don’t you agree?

Regardless if you’re a SEO expert, an anti spam crusader or a regular webmaster in need of more traffic the prospect of getting instant search engine rankings is one that sparks both fear and hope.

Hope that you will get your own site ranked, fear that your competitor will outrank you and for some the fear that the search results will be bloated with useless junk pumped up using the new method.

You can read all about it here, explained by Michael Campbell’s best friend Sammy the Spider, resident of the highly fictional search engine crawlers association:

http://www.jigglingtheweb.com/

It’s a lot of reading so I suspect many of you will not make it through everything at first attempt.

Now to the big question: DOES IT WORK? Can you get instant search engine rankings just by jiggling the web?

I believe it does work, not because I saw a unicorn flying out of the page but because I have several people I work with that have described variations of the exact same method and they all say it works.

Follow the method to the letter using a long tail keyword will in most cases give your a top 10 (and often top 3) ranking in as little as 3 hours.

It’s all about using news sites combined with social bookmarks and a final ping to trigger the THIS IS NEWS button in Googles algorithm. The result is instant search engine rankings for mid-long tail search terms and with a little extra work (that he explans) you can also rank for mid competition terms using this strategy.

Jiggling the Web for Instant Search Engine Rankings

Now go read that article if you didn’t already!

Simon

P.S. I’m doing a little experiment here, I’m going to release this blog post using the strategy outlined in Jiggling the Web for Instant Search Engine Rankings.

If the strategy works, by the time you read this I should already be on the first page of Google for the term “Instant Search Engine Rankings”, let’s see.

P.P.S There’s some good tips on the Affiliate Best Programs blog on how to get indexed by Google. Going through their checklist after jiggling the web will increase your organic position on the long run.