nofollow links will not help your search engine rankings.I can’t even begin to think of how many times I’ve been asked this question, or how many times I’ve seen this question asked on forums and discussion boards.  Do nofollow links provide any SEO benefits for my site?

The answer is NO.

Listen to Matt Cutts, a software engineer for Google and the head of Google’s web spam team in this video regarding how Google looks at nofollow and dofollow links on the web.  He makes it very clear, nofollow links are used to prevent the passing of page rank and anchor text to the linking site.  Google removes these links from their graph of the web and they have no impact on your search engine position.

You know what that means, even if you have a reference link from dozens of high page rank Wikipedia pages, none of them are going to do your site any good in search engines as they are no follow.  Links like these from Wikipedia might drive some traffic to your site, but that’s all you’ll get.

Filed under: Google and SEO

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