Follow Me or Not?

As I've previously mentioned, gaining links to your website is probably the most important off-site SEO strategy you can impliment to improve your rankings on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). However, simply adding a load of links to your site isn't the way to go.

SEO used to be simply the number of links or "votes" to your site would improve rankings, but with increased intricacies in the algorithms used by the search engines, this is now not only a possible waste of time, but also could be actually detrimental to your position.

The rise of vertical search means that links need to be chosen carefully, and if at all possible be relevant to your site or niche - what's the point of adding that link to the Thailand guest house if your website is all about London fashion? You get the point. This is all about "link juice" and every link from your site dilutes your authority and quality within the world wide web. Basically the more links you have leaving your site, the less quality the search engines assume it has - you're passing your "link juice" to another site. And if your site doesn't have many inbound links, then it's even worse, and your site is viewed as even less of an authority and could be labelled a "link farm" and even be excluded from search results. This would have to be on a huge scale and is not meant to scare any readers, it's just a big example to explain a little thing.

Google needed a way to fight these spam attacks on their algorithm, and so their Spam team decided in 2005 to introduce the nofollow attribute. This was originally introduced as a measure against blog spam, but was embraced by the whole web within a very short time and is now common. The basic idea is that you can add the no follow attribute to a link on your website, and the search engine will ignore any possible benefit to that site from yours. It doesn't ignore the link, but just does not pass on the "link juice" from your site.

So when do need to use nofollow? Well, maybe you have important information on your site to external pages, such as a list of books on amazon, for example. Well, you can nofollow the amazon links (they don't need your publicity) and you're still providing a service for your clients visiting your web.

I can offer you Barcelona SEO services for your company and website. Also, if you prefer, I can offer in-house SEO training in Barcelona. Contact me for more details.