Link building in different sectors of a website plays an important role whether it is an internal link or external link. One critical point in external link building is the state of follow or no follow link which is determined by you and has an impressive impact on SEO of the website. Therefore, we are up to providing enough information for website admins to be aware of this essential factor in SEO, so be with us to the end of this essential article.
Content overview
- What is follow and no follow link?
- Follow and no follow links from SEO point of view- why follow and no follow links are important?
- What links need to be follow? What links need to be no follow?
- How to define follow and no follow links?
- Conclusion
What is follow and no follow link?
As you know, follow means to go after something so no follow means not to go after. Therefore, we can say follow links, also known as do follow links, refers to those links of the website which we highly demand Google or other search engines to follow seriously and consider them more valuable. In other words, we invite Google to follow some links so that it can point to the link positively or negatively.
In contrast, no follow links refer to those links with neutral value which means we ask Google not to check those links so that there would be no positive or negative point considered for these links. In fact, when you change a link to no follow, the crawlers receive are asked by Google to stop crawling those links.
Follow and no follow links from SEO point of view- Why follow and no follow links are important?
By defining follow and no follow links you are actually changing the borders of your website which bring a great value and security to your website links. When a worthless link is not determined no follow, you allow the crawlers to access it with no difficulty. Consider the crawler finding a worthless and low security website from available links on your website. It definitely causes a negative point for your website. In other words, there are four main reasons to determine links follow or no follow:
- You will stop spam robots from benefiting from your website credit. There might be some exploiter or spam robots who try to build a link to their own website by leaving a comment on your contents and pages which is a serious risk from SEO point of view and you can simply avoid it by follow and no follow links.
- Duplicated contents would be omitted. If you have built two similar links in the same content or page, by considering one of them as no follow, the duplicated content wouldn’t be involved.
- You are trying hard, day and night, to bring more authority to your website with help of SEO techniques. If you don’t include follow and no follow links in the website, it is like you are taking all the hardships for other websites to grow.
- Using no follow links for advertising is another important point that proves to Google, you do not have paid backlinks. All you have to do is use no follow links for your ads. Therefore, it is better to ignore your paid backlinks for page rank.
What links need to be follow? What links need to be no follow?
You decide what links to determine follow and what to consider no follow. However, the point is you need to consider the valuable links follow.
In case of being sure of the value of the external link or website, you can simply consider the link follow. For example, if you are a digital marketing website who tries to publish useful content, you can build follow links to the top digital marketing agencies in the world as these websites are well-known and highly ranked in Google. As a result, Google will find you valuable too.
Similarly, when you have no idea about the value of the external links, you can consider them no follow, so that this way you have both built the external link and prohibited Google from rating you for the value of that link.
In better expression, define an external link follow when the requirements below are fulfilled:
- The link is highly valuable (The link juice is high).
- The subject of the link is related to your page.
- The website has no spam link.
- If the other website links to you too, try to make this a permanent link.
- The security of the other website is high.
Any other external link that doesn’t have the above features should be considered no follow. This will reduce getting a negative score from Google.
How to define follow and no follow links?
There are two ways to do this:
- In coding the website set limitations for follow and no follow links.
- Use free WordPress plug-ins.
If you want to change the codes, you need to ask the web designer to do it, however the code you need to add to the website would be like this: rel=”no follow” which needs to be added to the part you built the links. It sounds a little complicated so we recommend you to choose the second way.
A free WordPress plug-in of follow and no follow link determination is WP External Links.
An introduction to WP External Links WordPress plug-in
You can easily prepare and install this free WordPress plug-in. By doing this, you can determine the follow and no follow links without any hassle. It does not matter if the links are new or you want to change the old links. Working with this plugin is very simple and understandable which can be found both through the WordPress plug-in store and through a Google search.
Conclusion
Link building, both internals and externals are such an important issue in SEO. Therefore, gaining enough information and knowledge about this issue is also very vital. We tried our best to provide useful tips about follow and no follow links through this article. Hope you find it useful and make a positive change in your SEO of the website.
You would also need to be familiar with the technical aspects of website optimization, including website structure, URL structure, and backlinking. It’s essential to keep up-to-date with algorithm changes and search engine best practices in different countries to stay on top of the latest trends and techniques.
As an international SEO consultant, you should be able to communicate clearly with clients, manage multiple projects simultaneously, and work effectively with a team. You should also be able to track and analyze search engine metrics and analytics to provide detailed reports to clients regarding the success of their campaigns.