Nofollow Helps Internal Linking and Conversions - SEO Tip 51
I am a big fan of Marketing Sherpa and I have recommended them before when I posted ‘About Us’ pages can increase conversions. Well, another Marketing Sherpa study has caught my attention, describing how words increase conversions.
A few months ago I wrote an SEO tip explaining why you don’t want to use ‘click here’ for SEO, but we also know conversion rates increase when visitors are instructed to ‘click here’, ‘read more’, ‘buy now’ and so on. What is an SEO company to do?
How can search engine optimization and good user experience coexist? Both are important to the success of your website, but at times they seem at odds with each other. The solution is very simple, if not well known. Use the “nofollow” tag on the ‘click here’ links and make sure you also have a descriptive link with keyword-rich text available as well.
While the “nofollow” tag was originally set up as a spam fighter, it can be used with surgical precision to increase conversions, without hurting you SEO campaign. (Read more about the uses of nofollow) It helps because it will tell the search engines not to count or follow the link with the nofollow attribute. This means the keyword-rich link, without the nofollow, will be followed, helping the destination page’s link popularity.
How do you use nofollow?
Normal link:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Click Here</a>
Adding the nofollow attribute:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Click Here</a>
Using it on your site might look like this:
Click here for the best deals on dog treats.
The HTML code would look like this:
<a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com” rel=”nofollow”>Click here</a> for the best deals on <a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com”>dog treats</a>.
Finally, SEO and Site Usability living in perfect harmony, until we start talking about graphics vs. text. 
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7 Responses to “Nofollow Helps Internal Linking and Conversions - SEO Tip 51”
By Matt on Dec 20, 2007 | Reply
yeah, I would tend to avoid “click here” like you stated but no follow is a good solution around it. I was going to make some links on my site no follow like about/faq but realized someone might need/want to find it through SE’s.
By Gabriel Gervelis on Jan 2, 2008 | Reply
Using noFollow tags to control link juice is a good idea. I have used noFollow and shot out links from home pages with no worries!
By Seo on Jan 15, 2008 | Reply
Maybe you guys should write an article about how to detect hidden text on sites…I recommend disabling CSS and the sites are very different right?
Of course is risky for a client’s site..think about competitors who can find that and report it to Google..this is the stuff Google bans a site for..trust me works very well..too bad… I was starting to love your blog
Good luck
Marius,
By Pinky on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
Nice tips.
By SEO Solutions on Jan 25, 2008 | Reply
Using the no-follow command could really help a site in terms of polishing its outbound links and controlling PR pass
By Dan - Life Coaching on Mar 26, 2008 | Reply
That’s really helpful and immensely simple! Thanks for this.
By Omaha SEO on Mar 28, 2008 | Reply
“Nofollow” links are still followed. They just don’t pass weight.
Search engines lie.
This is similar to how pages that you insist that you do not want to be crawled in your robots.txt are still crawled by Yahoo.