No follow vs do follow the how to

[edward-may]

Hi Guys,

Sorry if this is an ammature question, just wanted to know I noticed a few people talking about no follows and do follows for backlinks.  Is there suppose to be some way to set you website up as nofollow and dofollow for backlinks?  I noticed a few people saying to make sure that some directories are nofollow, i would like to know if I can set this up for my own site as I'm a bit conscious and paranoid about others that might backlink to my site who have huge spam or negative seo etc?

Any insight into this would be much appreciated

Thanks all

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It's important to remember that a healthy link profile will be a mix of both dofollow and nofollow links. There is no rule of thumb that says which links should contain which attributes, but if you were in a generic directory, for example, you would want it to be nofollowed.

More often than not, any link that is given editorially is fine with whatever it comes with. Nofollowed links are very useful, but just don't pass page rank.

Google is pretty smart at detecting spam links and negative SEO though, due to how these normally appear, so I wouldn't worry too much, unless you have seen something that is concerning you? You are also able to handle any negative SEO or bad links through disavowing the links in Webmaster Tools.

I hope this helps a little?

-Andy

[ATP]

Hi Edward,

You are a little confused about what this means i think so let me try to explain.

Each link can be assigned an attribute called rel="nofollow", the person who owns the link has control of this attribute so you can control if the links on your website are nofollow, but you have no control of the link people point to your website.

Generally speaking you want your link profile to contain both and it demonstrates a healthy link profile.

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

Using nofollow them on your own website

The use of nofollow links on your own website to your own pages stops google crawling and indexing certain pages on your website. For example is you had a "Login" or "Checkout" page. Many people choose to nofollow it to stop google crawling and indexing it. This stop a page with normally fairly poor content due to its nature being indexed on your site.

It is also used to prevent duplicate content, if you know a page is a duplicate of another but it is needed, rather than use canocial tags etc some people choose to nofollow them.

Im summary You can't nofollow links that point to your website from external sites (unless you contact the person sending the link and they agree to do so). Your best defence against spammy links is to monitor your link profile and when a link pops up you dont link follow the normal channels to remove it,

nofollow on your own website should only be used to stop google crawling and indexing certain links and passing link juice as and when you need it. It Google still has a bot that crawls through nofollows. But in general it will recognise your wishes.

[ClaytonJ]

In short - do not concern yourself about negative SEO.  Yes it can happen - but if you monitor your site the way you are - ie using moz diagnostics to regularly crawl back links etc. you will identify spam links and then can go through the procedure to disallow.  So you have that covered.

However you should appreciate that if someone creates a link for you, an editorial article - generally you want a follow link.  I spend time for clients trying to turn no-follows into follows. Then you get the link juice and the bump hopefully in rankings.

Clear as mud? If not let me know. Good question your on the right track.