No-follow Link

A No-follow link refers to backlinks that tell the search engines to not go any further, hence the term “no follow”. By adding the no-follow tag in the backlink, these links don’t transfer the link juice. Remember that link juice is what determines Pagerank, and the more link juice you have, the higher the page rank a page has.

No-follow links are originally made to stop spamming in blog posts because users will be able to spam blogs with links back to their site that would transfer link juice which is undesirable. No-follow links aren’t isolated to just blog posts though; no-follow links can be found in certain article directories, and anywhere the webmaster wants to put them.

What types of links are No-follow?

All links with No-follow tags are technically no-follow links

Some of the inbound links(link coming from another website to your own website) from these sources tend to be no-follow:

• Social media(example, links in Instagram and Facebook posts)
• User-generated content and links in forum posts
• Blog comments
  

Following popular sites use the no-follow tag on all of their outbound links(a link from your website to a different website:

• Wikipedia
• Quora
• Youtube
• Medium
• Reddit
  

When should you use no-follow links?

Blog Comments- This is the most common place to use no-follow links to prevent spammy link comments. For example, website builders like WordPress use the no-follow link plugin on their website.

Forums- Prevents spammy comments and keeps content authentic.

Paid links- If you’re paying for a particular place, it shouldn’t count towards organic link traffic.

Benefits

1. It Drives traffic- Traffic from the Nofollow link counts just like the one from Dofollow links because people click and interact with it just like any other link. You can attract more leads and if they spend a good amount of time on your website, it can send a signal to Google to increase your ranking.
2. It helps build brand awareness- Since Nofollow links can still drive traffic to your website, they can help to build brand awareness as the visitors get to know more about your business, products, and services.
3. They normalize your profile- Most of the popular websites like Amazon and Facebook use no-follow links because they help to make your profile look natural and normal.