Most website owners know that links are an important part of SEO. Links can help boost your rankings and get more traffic to your site. However, not every link is going to help you and some back links could hurt you. It is very important to know the difference between the types of links so that you can design the links showing up on your site to only help your site and not hurt it.
Types of Back Links
There are two main types of back links that you have to be concerned with. Do follow links are those links that you want the search engine crawlers to follow because they will help your site rankings. These are links that contain useful and relevant information that compliment your site and some substance to your site.
The other type of back links are no follow links. No follow links are back links that the search engine crawlers do not fol
low and do not use towards the calculations for our site ranking. A no follow link will not be relevant to your site or it will not contain information that is useful and could possible hurt your rankings.
The Invention of No Follow Links
No follow links were designed to help sites where visitors can leave links in comments. Webmasters were concerned about spam links left in their comments being used to penalize their rankings. Google actually create the no follow link process to help webmasters have more control over the legitimate links that were used to rank their sites. Basically a no follow link is a link that has a special tag added to the end of it that lets the web crawlers know not to follow that link.
Generally, you want back links on your site to be a do follow link. However, you can still have some no follow links on your site. Search engines actually like to see some no follow links. Do not go overboard on qualifying every single link as a do follow and cutting out those that are no follow. A nice balance of back links is what you should be aiming for. Obviously, any spam link can be no follow link, but some links, even unrelated to your website, could be okay to leave on your site. Remember that not every link is going to be strictly for search engine rankings. Some links will serve as way to help you get traffic to your site. It is a delicate process of figuring out what links to allow on your site and which ones to make no follow links. As with most things related to SEO it just takes time to figure it out and learn the tricks to making it work.
When it comes to no and do follow links you need to do what is best for your site. You have to use your judgment on what you will and will not allow. You need to do checks of the links on your site on a regular basis. You have to keep on top your links in order to be sure that you are not having a huge imbalance of do follow a no follow links.
