3 Reasons You Need to Build Nofollow Backlinks

If you know a little about SEO, I am sure you have heard of “dofollow backlinks” and “nofollow backlinks”. A “Dofollow backlink” is a link that tells search engines to pass along its SEO juice (or PageRank credit) to an outbound link.   A “Nofollow backlink” is a link that removes the ability to pass on its PageRank influence to other sites.  Obviously, nofollow backlinks are less valuable in terms of SEO.

If you use blog commenting to build backlinks, you will find most comments these days only give you nofollow backlinks.  Most of social media sites only allow nofollow backlinks as well.

So, do you need to spend time building nofollow backlinks?  Yes, you do.

Here are three reasons:

1. Search engines do follow nofollow backlinks for index purposes.  They just don’t credit them with the PageRank of the origin site because nofollow backlinks don’t pass any PageRank influence down to your site.
2. From the search engines perspective, you want your links to be in good “neighbourhoods”. If Google sees your nofollow backlinks from all over PageRank1+ sites, it can only do good to your websites.
3. Nofollow backlinks bring traffic to your website.  If a nofollow backlink to your site gets shared a lot in social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, search engines will recognize the increase in popularity.  Google does use data from social sites for ranking. Listen to Matt Cutts insights on this topic.

In short, you still need to build nofollow backlinks from creditable high Pagerank sites. They could be blog comments or social media links. Building nofollow backlinks should be part of your wider SEO strategy.  So don’t worry about nofollow backlinks or dofollow backlinks. Just do it.  Of course, you still need to find ways to build quality high PR backlinks to boost the ranking of your website.