The “no follow” tag or attribute (or more simply the characteristic defining the property attached to an element, here the link) is used to give an instruction to search engines not to follow, that is to say, to explore, the specific link leaving the page.
This information is set in the source code of the web page.
If this tag is not present, the links are understood as “do follow” links which must be followed, and therefore taken into account in the engine algorithms.
Note: this does not change anything for the Internet user who does not see the HTML code of the site page.
What about in the context of natural referencing?
In terms of natural referencing, Google relies on many criteria, including the number and quality of links pointing to a site to establish the positioning of websites in its search results.
Intervening therefore in the PageRank of Google and making it possible to quantitatively measure the popularity of a web page, the search for “do follow” links is a priority especially if they come from quality sites, ie with strong notoriety and in connection with your activity (indeed, if the activity is financial analysis, for example, it is better to be “cited” by BFM Business than FR3).
But for a “no follow” link?
A priori, the engine would pay little attention to it, but does it take it into account anyway? The debate is open and opinions are divided. For some, the impact is “almost” zero, the official version of Google is ” as a rule, Google does not follow these links ” and for others, no-follow links are important in the SEO of a site.
To conclude this article, some observations:
- alternating the dofollow and nofollow links is necessary because it must remain natural, Google knows well that a site does not receive only “good” links (and a site that only has “do follow” links would rather intrigue the engine…)
- nofollow links are used by Internet users (registration links, paid links, irrelevant blog comments, etc.) and in social networks (by definition in nofollow) and these generate traffic… = criterion is widely taken into account by Google!
- Google's tool crawls a lot of site parameters, it would not be surprising if it occasionally follows these links, especially if they indicate a link with high authority sites.
So as long as you're building links with common sense, making sure they're (most important factor, in my opinion) relevant, useful, and natural, why should we go without!
