SEO Blog

This is a topic that many webmasters have wondered about. Let’s face it, not every link out there will help build your website’s link popularity and search engine ranking. It is well known that most forums and blogs use “nofollow” tags to prevent giving PageRank away to spammers’ websites. Is this the case with the social networking giants Twitter and Facebook? 

As Matt Cutts of Google correctly states, links from Twitter pages have nofollow tags in them. FaceBook also automatically inserts nofollow tags in links that are posted on FaceBook pages. For those of you who do not know what a nofollow tag is, allow me to explain by posting the Wikipedia definition:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

In order to get links that will help build your website’s PageRank and search ranking, you need to make sure they are not links with the nofollow tag in them. So, how can you tell which links have these tags in them? It’s simple, just do a View/Source check on the web page from your browser and look for the link in question (or you can use the Search Status plugin for Firefox that will highlight all nofollow tags on a page). If it has a nofollow tag next to it, the search engines will discount the link and not apply it to the link popularity of the web page it is pointing to. Here is an example of a nofollow tag in use:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount drugs</a>

As you can see, the link above has the nofollow tag in the HREF itself, meaning that search engines will not credit this link as they would a regular link that doesn’t have a nofollow tag in it.

Does this mean you should abandon social networking when it comes to your SEO efforts? Well, if you are adding links to Twitter and FaceBook in hopes that they will add to your web pages’ link popularity, I’d say you’d be better off going after links that will actually act as “votes” for your web pages in the search engine results. However, I am not discounting the value of social networking as a way to generate traffic to your web pages. You just need to keep in mind that if your goal is to increase the search engine ranking of your web pages, you must get links from sites that will pass PageRank onto them.