The big question, is do you “do follow” or do you “no follow?” Some of you are probably wondering what in the heck I’m talking about.
Let me first say, if you are trying to make money blogging, this bit of information about the “no follow” tag is another great tip you don’t want to pass up learning.
Do follow and no follow is one of those “on page SEO tips” you don’t want to take lightly.
Understanding how it works can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic you get to your blog, especially when you apply this rule to all of your posts and articles.
My job is to make sure you learn all of the blogging tips on how to fully optimize every pixel of your pages to help the search engines give your pages better rank.
If you’re trying to make money blogging and you are not learning the details of “on page SEO”, you are losing traffic and money. I bet that’s not what you want.
Learning and working with the SEO details that I’m about to show you, takes a bit more time, but the time you spend is well worth the effort for ranking your site and it’s pages. You are simply throwing away money if you don’t pay attention to the details of “on page SEO.”
Applying The No Follow Tag Is A Must
If you haven’t learned about this “do follow” and “no follow” topic until just now, and you’ve been blogging for a while, you’re going to want to go back and clean up your site so the search engines will give each page of your domain more credit where credit is due.
Believe me, you will want to make sure you take full advantage of this simple trick, or your site pages may never be found by people searching for the information you’ve worked hard at creating.
What Exactly Is The No Follow Tag?
Okay, for those of you who don’t know what “do follow” and “no follow” is, let me break it down. “No follow” is a tag you will add to some of your internal and external links to help search engines when they spider your site.
Proper use of the “no follow” tag helps to give your site and pages a better rank. Not using the tag properly, or at all, can discount your site pages.
What Are Internal Links?
An internal link is any kind of link you have on any page of your site that leads to another page on your site.
Those internal links can be textual links, image links or URL links.
The links will always show up in the html format as seen in the images below.
When a search engine spiders your site, you want to let the search engine know which links to follow and which links not to follow, and you do that by either adding the “no follow” html tag within the html link structure, or by leaving the “no follow” tag out of the html.
What Are External Links?
An external link is any kind of link you have on any page of your site that leads to another page on another domain.
External links can be textual links, image links, URL links and affiliate banner ad links.
Where To Use The No Follow Tag
Since search engines don’t like affiliate sites, according to almost everything you read, you don’t want the search engines to follow the affiliate banner ad links and affiliate textual links.
To keep the search engine spiders from following your ad links, you will need to add the “no follow” tag to every one of your affiliate ads on every single page.
Basically, you are telling the search engine spiders that those affiliate ad links are not important and not to follow them. I mention this once, but if you have not added the “no follow” tag on your site pages where necessary, you will need to go through and add this “no follow” everywhere. Your time and effort will be well worth it.
Be sure to re-ping your site pages after you have updated them with the “no follow” tag.
The images below show where to paste the “no follow” tag for links you don’t want the search engines to follow.
By adding the “no follow” tags to ads, you will be improving the rank of your pages and your entire site.
I don’t think I need to explain the details of what a better rank will do for your pages. Let me just say that I know you’d rather have a page of your site found on page one of Google for certain keyword search phrases, than on page 356 where no one will ever find it. You might not move up that far by just working with the no follow tag, but every little bit of “on page” optimization will help your pages move up.
When you apply all of the tips for “on page SEO”, your site pages will continually move up into a better position for people to find when searching for information on the search engines. It’s all in the details of SEO.
Adding No Follow To Images
Another place you will want to add the “no follow” tag is on any images that you add to your pages. Adding the “no follow” tag will tell the search engine spiders that the images are not important to follow.
You basically only want the search engines to follow any important link, like links leading to high PR pages on your site or on other sites.
Okay, so now you’re probably wondering where in the HTML code to add the “no follow” tag. Let me explain …
To help the pages on your site even more, there are a couple of places you will want to add the “do follow” tag. One: You will add that “do follow” tag to any html link when you are linking to a high ranking page within another site.
Two: You will add the “do follow” tag when you link to another page within your own site that offers content related to the page you are linking from.
When To Leave Out The No Follow Tag
It’s great to link to high page ranking pages on other sites and allow the search engines to follow the links by leaving out the “no follow” tag.
It’s even better if the high ranking pages on the other sites are offering the same topic or niche as your site pages offer.
When you allow the search engines to follow the links to high page rank pages on other sites, it makes your site look more important and it gives your pages a better rank.
The best way to link to another page is to do it with a textual link that offers relevant keywords to the topic of both pages, as opposed to using only a domain URL link.
In other words, if you are discussing making money in one post, you could turn the keyword phrase “making money” on that page into a textual link leading to another article or post on your site, or another site that discusses the same making money topic.
It’s always best if you can link your posts to other similar articles or posts with a relevant keyword phrase and then leave off the “no follow” tag to allow the search engines to follow those links.
Do Follow To High Ranking Pages
One note to keep in mind… if at all possible, link to high rank pages and NOT to low ranking pages within a site that has a high ranking home page.
Let me explain: My home page has a PR 4 at the time I am writing this post, but many pages in my site only have a PR 0 or PR 1, or no PR at all. In this case, it would be best if you linked to my home page that offers a PR 4, and leave out the “no follow” tag so the search engines can follow your link to my high ranking home page. It’s also better if my site niche is related to your site or related the post content where your link is found.
If you link to a related page, be sure to use a textual link and make sure your link leads to a page with a high PR.
If you don’t know the difference between a textual link and a domain URL link, a textual link is a link with a keyword phrase, and a domain URL link is just the domain name turned into the link.
How Do You Find PR Or Page Rank?
If some of you are new to blogging and you don’t know how to find the page rank (PR) of the web pages you visit, I created a post that talks about using the SEO Quake tool bar to display the PR of every page you visit.
You will want to make sure you get that SEO Quake tool if you are in this blogging business to make money. The SEO Quake tool bar is one of those invaluable blogging tools for bloggers who want to make money blogging. The SEO Quake tool bar works with the Firefox browser.
I like to keep a Notepad document open with all of my html tags listed for easy access to copy and paste when ever I am creating a new post or article for my blog. I call that Notepad document my HTML Cheat Sheet.
Then, I simply copy the “no follow” tag from my cheat sheet and paste it where necessary.
If you want to learn more great details about SEO and blogging, be sure to get registered on the right sidebar to get the free blogging ebook.
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That’s about all you’ll need to know about using the “do follow” tag in your html links.