What is a nofollow tag and why do I care?
By JB on Aug 13, 2008 in Linking Strategies | comments(3)
One of the most popular ways of generating traffic for your blog is to generate back links. These are links to your site from another website. There are many different things we can talk about related to backlinks such as the quality of backlinks, how to attract backlinks with quality content and how to use anchor text in backlinks to make your blog more relevant for your chosen key words. Before we get there though, we need to generate some content which gives people a reason to link to your site. That’s why you will see so many of the better SEO marketers tell you to “create quality content… create quality content… create quality content”.
If you create quality content, then people will WANT to link to your site, without you having to ask. These are the most natural links you can receive and believe me when I say that Google will eventually figure out if you aren’t linking naturally.
Let me give you an example. I was reading an article recently which lead me to a website which maintains a pretty exhaustive list of “do follow blogs.” Because I think that the site is valuable to you and me, I have linked to it in the previous sentence using the anchor text of “do follow blogs.” Let me be clear though… the value I found in the list had more to do with some of the blogs that I found and am interested in and less about finding a place to post comment spam. And my link is a “do follow link”. Technically speaking, a do follow link is just a link that does not use the nofollow tag, which is designed to tell search engines NOT to follow the link.