Quick SEO Tip Nofollow Deletes Link Benefit

Quick SEO Tip: Avoid using rel=”nofollow”, nofollow DELETES link benefit!

That means if you use the rel=”nofollow” attributes on links from your website you are throwing away your hard earned PageRank/link benefit for ZERO SEO gain.

In PageRank/link benefit terms, Google treats a nofollow link like a dofollow link (a link which lacks nofollow) in that the nofollow link ‘uses’ PageRank! If this next link to the SEO testing article had a nofollow attribute (it doesn’t) and the 9 links below were the ONLY links from this page (so 10 links in total).

Google would still consider this page as having 10 links in PageRank terms, it would share this webpages PageRank fairly between the 10 links.

Now 9 of the links are dofollow and will pass PageRank/link benefit, but the one nofollow links PageRank is deleted!

That means 10% of the PageRank is lost without doing any SEO work, in mathematical terms the 9 followed links receive 10% of the link benefit each. If the 10th nofollow link didn’t exist the 9 links would now receive 11.1% of the PageRank each!

1.1% extra PageRank isn’t a lot, but on some websites there’s a lot of nofollow links, for example if you use WordPress and have a lot of comments with links, the links are almost certainly all nofollow.

Google Pagerank Distribution Algorithm

If you have an article with 50 links (sidebar links, links from the main content) and 50 links from within comments, 50% of that pages PageRank/link benefit is deleted due to those nofollow links!

You worked hard to generate links to your content, those nofollow links are wasting your PageRank for no SEO gain, you should go out of your way to remove nofollow from your links.

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