Nofollow is an attribute that assigned to a link that tells search engines the link should not be counted towards a sites authority.
In other words, nofollow links do not pass link juice.
Example: <a rel=”NOFOLLOW” href=”http://outstandingseo.com”>SEO<a/>
A link without the nofollow tag is a follow, or followed link.
Search engines originally created nofollow to reduce webspam, or at least the affect, which would increase the quality of their search indexes as a result.
Nofollow works perfectly when the site owner allows people to post links without moderation. Because then they are letting the search engines know that they don’t vouch for the linked-to page.
Nofollow also became useful for link sculpting. Link sculpting is the art of nofollowing links to funnel more link juice to the more important links. The concept is simple: Think of a bucket (web page) with ten holes (links) in it, if you pour a liter of water into the bucket 100ml will flow through each hole. Reduce that to five holes and the volume increases to 200ml per hole.
This is exactly how link sculpting works, allowing you to nofollow unimportant links, so that more juice will flow through to your most important ones. In 2009 Google changed how nofollow works. Instead of stopping the juice flow through nofollow links, search engines now allow it to flow through even though it isn’t counted, essentially making nofollow a link juice black hole.
This change has rendered nofollow useless for link sculpting.
Nofollow Link Building
If nofollow links don’t pass link juice, is it still worth building them?
In our opinion, yes.
Remember, nofollow links appear no different than follow links to users, so they are still a perfectly viable source of referral traffic.
The key to successful SEO is a diversified link portfolio, and successful websites have a variety of links, including both follow and nofollow links. If your website only has followed links, it is sure to raise some flags and impede your growth.
