There have been a lot of talk about the differences and benefits of do-follow links and no-follow links for search engine optimization. 

Of course, it’s good to do-follow because you will get the link juice from one site to the other site and also because of the anchor text for keywords relevance.

But what about no-follow links. The no-follow links were created by Google. The idea was that Google would not follow the link to crawl its content.

The no-follow links would not count the link in calculation Page Rank and Google would not count the anchor text in determining what the keywords the target page was relevant for.

So all this means that you will not get any link juice if a website makes a no-follow link to your site right? But (yes, I will say it again… there is always a but).

It’s all about traffic
This was invented by Google – but all the search engine is not treating the no-follow links the same way. But of course if the target no-follow page is being linked to from another website – that does not have the no-follow attribute – they would follow that link.

Yahoo – will crawl and they will index the content, but no juice will be passed on.

Ask – they don’t recognize the no-follow link meaning and they will completely ignore the no-follow attribute.

You need both kinds of links
If you do some research on the blogosphere you will some conflicting results. But all together you need both kinds of links. And why?

Getting only do-follow links would look unnatural and that might cause alarm. We all want out links to look natural for the search engines. Getting a high Page Rank no-follow link is always good. If not in Google than in the other search engines

Remember all links can bring traffic – and that’s what it’s all about.

When should you use no-follow?

• If you don’t trust a website but still would like to link to it for some reason. Why would you pass link juice to a website you don’t trust?
• If you have a blog, you should consider removing the no-follow on links to serious contributors who provide useful content to you.
• If people just write a brief message on your blog, you might want to make a no-follow. Do not give value to them.
• When planning your site and its menu structure, you should consider putting no-follow on pages that do not serve any purpose in Google’s index or pages that have to occur several times with different URL’s. Search engines don’t like to see the same content on different URLs
• Why spend the effort to allocate value to your contact page? Make prefer to place values from your contact page to one of your other important pages.

I hope this article has given you some info. Give me a comment. When do you use no-follow links?