What is a nofollow link?

What does a nofollow link actually mean?

We’ve already touched on this briefly when discussing Robots.txt, but let’s dig a little deeper.

A nofollow link is a hyperlink that tells search engines (like Google) not to pass any value to the linked page—it simply serves as a reference.

The “value” being referred to here is what’s commonly known as pagerank—essentially a measure of authority that can be transferred to the linked page.

A nofollow link contains the attribute rel=”nofollow” in the HTML code.

Here’s what it might look like:

< a href=”www.mickyweis.dk” rel=”nofollow” >

A regular (dofollow) link would look like this:

< a href=”www.mickyweis.dk” >

So the only difference is that the nofollow tag tells search engines not to pass any SEO value, but simply to acknowledge the link as a reference.

In contrast, a dofollow link signals to search engines that they should pass on value.

There’s no need to explicitly add a tag for this, since dofollow is the default for most websites.

Are nofollow links bad?

Not at all.

A nofollow link can still drive traffic to your site.

And when working with link building, it’s actually a good idea to aim for a natural-looking backlink profile.

Since most of your backlinks will typically be dofollow, mixing in some nofollow links adds healthy variation.