There are many reasons you may want to add nofollow tags to hyperlinks, the main reason being to block links from paying advertisers from benefitting from your PageRank.  Do you know how to add the nofollow tag to your hyperlinks?

There are 2 types of links: dofollow and nofollow.  When neither tag is present, the default setting is dofollow. The nofollow tag tells a search engine’s crawler not to give any weight or “Google juice” to the link you have posted.

An in-depth discussion of the benefits and uses of nofollow will be covered in another article.  For now, we’ll be focusing on how to add the nofollow tag to links when you know it should be there.

How to Add Nofollow Tags to Links

A regular link (to a helpful article, great post, or relevant blog) will be a normal, followed link.  Its code will look like this when you switch to the html view in your dashboard:

That normal code is how every regular followed link should look when you view its html. To add the nofollow tag in, you’ll add this snippet of html code to your existing link:

rel=”nofollow”

That one simple piece of code will prevent search engine spiders from following the link, in effect, giving no weight to the link.  In other words, the link juice from your page will not flow into that link or out to its corresponding site.

I’ve shown the nofollow tag in red in the example below so you can see the placement.  To add the nofollow tag, your html code will now look like this:

That’s all there is to it.  Adding nofollow tags is quick and easy to do when you know the proper way to modify your html code.  Remember that to be in compliance with Google and many other search engine’s policies, you’ll want to add nofollow tags to all paid links from advertisers. 

In a nutshell:  If you get compensation for the link, it’s best not to be flowing PageRank to the link.  Respectable webmasters and public relations reps know that building backlinks is something you do the old fashioned way – with great content and real relationships, NOT by buying links!