This topic has been debated over and over on many websites, blogs and forums ever since the NoFollow tag made its appearance. However, I’d like to share my thoughts on this matter and see what are your opinions about it.
The Nofollow attribute was first introduced by Google as a way to fight spam. Basically, what this attribute does is tell search engines’ spiders not to follow this specific link (more info on Nofollow: Google’s Search Console Help) and Google won’t transfer any link juice to it.
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However, the Nofollow attribute is surrounded by controversy. There are diverging opinions about it. One one side, those who support the use of nofollow on links to fight spammers back and share link juice with those sites that are really contributing to the web.
This is my position about it – while I can understand the reasons why people discourage the use of nofollow tags on links to help spread some link love around the web, I believe there are situations when using nofollow is mandatory. Some of those situations are:
Paid links: it’s a fact that all major search engines are penalizing those sites selling links. To avoid any impact, you should mark them with a nofollow tag. When linking to internal pages that don’t need “link juice”: pages like Contact, About, Privacy Policy, etc. don’t need link juice. Save your dofollow links to pages / links that actually provide value to your visitors.
Linking to questionable sites: this one is a no-brainer. Linking out to sites that provide questionable contents (warez, porn, racism, etc) will hurt your position in the SERP. Nofollow ’em or else…
Blog Comments: now, I’m quite sure that some of you won’t agree with me about this point – and that’s OK. As much as I’d like to reward you all with a dofollow link, there’s spam. And I’m not just talking about viagra, cialis and the like. I’m also referring to those who leave meaningless comments just to get a link back. Those are also spam comments. I prefer getting 7-8 quality comments over getting 100+ spammy ones anyday.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]