The words “no follow” probably don’t mean much to the average newbie, but they can be critical to search engine optimizing your website.
You see whenever you place a link on your site to another site, you are giving away a little bit of “pagerank“ to that other site. You are endorsing that site and thus telling Google that they should give it a little respect.
Now the more you do this, the more it hurts your own site, because Google may begin to think that you’re selling links, or just a link farm. And Google may penalize you in their rankings. So it’s important to use nofollow tags on as many outbound and inbound links as possible.
When it comes to blog comments, the majority of blogs have “no follow” tags in their comments section, because they don’t want to dilute their pagerank with dozens or potentially 100′s of outbound links.
It’s actually easy to add no-follow tags to your links by adding “rel=nofollow” to your link structure example instead of <a href= at the beginning of your link, change it to <a rel=”nofollow” href=
If you’ve got a lot of outbound links on your site now, you should add the rel=”nofollow” to them. Affiliate links, Ads, Blogrolls, etc..
And if you have non-essential pages like contact, privacy, terms, login etc.. you should make those inbound links no-follow too.
