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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14 Responses to “Nofollow Helps Internal Linking and Conversions – SEO Tip 51”
By Matt (2 comments.) 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 (2 comments.) 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 DNL (18 comments.) 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 (1 comments.) on Jan 24, 2008 | Reply
Nice tips.
By SEO Solutions (6 comments.) 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 Jeff (1 comments.) 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.
By Pradeep (1 comments.) on May 17, 2008 | Reply
Yeah nofollow is good to filter your outbound links from your main post body
but i dont know why most of blog publisher dont remove nofollow attributes from there comment field
cant we show some courtesy to our visitor who spend some time to reply or praise our work?
By Mark White (1 comments.) on May 23, 2008 | Reply
let me also add some emphisis on the fact that no follow links are followed , but they don’t add in the page rank value.
Mark
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By Bill (6 comments.) on Jun 10, 2008 | Reply
Great article, they talked about this at SMX in Seattle this year. Wonder when nofollow will fall into the realm of gray hat SEO and Google will have to take action against it.
By Rob (1 comments.) on Jun 23, 2008 | Reply
Nice article. Very informative.
Just so you know, the link to marketing sherpa is not correct.
its linking to another site.
Rob
By Shell Harris (164 comments.) on Jun 23, 2008 | Reply
Rob – The link to Marketing Sherpa has been fixed. Thanks for the heads up.
By SEO/webdesign=1.prioritet (7 comments.) on Apr 20, 2009 | Reply
As Bill says, no-follow are still followed, but they are without value. I think they lost their value after the Big Daddy Update in 2006. It looks good in a sitelink test, but they doesn´t help you.
By Aron (1 comments.) on Jul 9, 2009 | Reply
It depends on what kind of nofollow link it is. I give you sample wikipedia is a nofollow link site and yet why is it always ranking?