Hello everyone,
My name is William and for the last 15 years I have been developing and marketing websites. In the last 3 years I have mostly worked with server side technologies and our user interfaces, but I do spend a large amount of time sharing our company (Wubur) website, writing content, and marketing as well. I hope to help some of you understand the concept of nofollow. In my experience, and with some common sense thrown in, I came to the conclusion years ago that using 'nofollow' links on forums is a great idea, and better for everyone involved.
If you do not understand what 'nofollow' is or how it works, it is an HTML attribute applied to URLs or links/websites shared on the internet. It looks like this:
<a href='https://website' rel='nofollow'>Nofollow link example</a>
This tells the search engines that the link should not gain any page rank or special treatment just because it is linked to. It's possible that this link still can have an effect on rankings, but many parts of the algorithms in use on major search providers are still unknown to the masses. Nofollow was put into place because companies such as Google were experiencing difficulties with using linking as a metric for page rank due to the sheer amount of spam and auto-linking going on with blog comments and old / non-moderated forums. Nofollow solved the issue by allowing site owners to automatically apply nofollow to every link shared by users, or even on links they didn't want to be affected by the content the link is on.
Simply put, the way that SEO works is complicated and doesn't entirely rely on the number of links you have to your website. The content being linked to, and the content being linked from matters significantly. That's why you always want your links to be surrounded by content that relates to the link you are sharing. If you are posting a link to your website development company, then you should be discussing website development, or a related topic like marketing, SEO or project planning. It all comes down to key words and making sure your project or business is being linked to and from properly is very important.
The forum owner can't honestly vouch for every link being posted, and linking to hundreds or thousands of different websites (linked in signatures or posts themselves) can lead search engines to view the forum as being more broad than it actually is. For the forum users, a nofollow link can actually protect their website even if they don't see how their own personal content could ever have a negative effect on their own site. When you share a signature with all of your posts, you are technically attaching your website to the content you are replying to or creating. If you write a forum post about dogs and link to your website about technology, then a search engine or bot may look at this as your website being related to dogs.
You may find yourself constantly replying to discussions or starting conversations that aren't related to your website. This alone makes nofollow incredible. While you can control the content you share, you cannot control the others users in the community. If their replies are low quality or off topic it does not help your page rank. If the forum discussion is full of user signatures (NOT using nofollow), it appears as if the page is some sort of poor attempt at old-school link generating.
Without nofollow on forums, companies such as Google and Bing will not treat that forum as a good source of linked content. This can be less true for very specific niche forums, or for very well-written content that has high quality replies that also aren't diluted with other links. However, it's always a bit safer to have nofollow attributes attached to your links on forums. You can still get traffic on your website from natural human clicks (the main source of attraction here at FP), so it's worth sharing your link(s) even if you aren't gaining anything in the major search ranks.
You should definitely not disregard the potential of linking to your website in useful replies of your own across the internet's many blogs, forums, and social networks. If your site relates to the content, even if nofollow is being used you can definitely benefit from sharing the URL. I didn't want to jump into the fine details of SEO here, such as the differences between linking to your homepage versus a specific page or article, but I hope to have helped some readers here (either in the FP community or as a guest coming from a search engine). This article accurately explains why nofollow links are good for a forum or blog owner and the community members, but if you do have more questions I would be happy to answer here!
My name is William and for the last 15 years I have been developing and marketing websites. In the last 3 years I have mostly worked with server side technologies and our user interfaces, but I do spend a large amount of time sharing our company (Wubur) website, writing content, and marketing as well. I hope to help some of you understand the concept of nofollow. In my experience, and with some common sense thrown in, I came to the conclusion years ago that using 'nofollow' links on forums is a great idea, and better for everyone involved.
If you do not understand what 'nofollow' is or how it works, it is an HTML attribute applied to URLs or links/websites shared on the internet. It looks like this:
<a href='https://website' rel='nofollow'>Nofollow link example</a>
This tells the search engines that the link should not gain any page rank or special treatment just because it is linked to. It's possible that this link still can have an effect on rankings, but many parts of the algorithms in use on major search providers are still unknown to the masses. Nofollow was put into place because companies such as Google were experiencing difficulties with using linking as a metric for page rank due to the sheer amount of spam and auto-linking going on with blog comments and old / non-moderated forums. Nofollow solved the issue by allowing site owners to automatically apply nofollow to every link shared by users, or even on links they didn't want to be affected by the content the link is on.
Simply put, the way that SEO works is complicated and doesn't entirely rely on the number of links you have to your website. The content being linked to, and the content being linked from matters significantly. That's why you always want your links to be surrounded by content that relates to the link you are sharing. If you are posting a link to your website development company, then you should be discussing website development, or a related topic like marketing, SEO or project planning. It all comes down to key words and making sure your project or business is being linked to and from properly is very important.
The forum owner can't honestly vouch for every link being posted, and linking to hundreds or thousands of different websites (linked in signatures or posts themselves) can lead search engines to view the forum as being more broad than it actually is. For the forum users, a nofollow link can actually protect their website even if they don't see how their own personal content could ever have a negative effect on their own site. When you share a signature with all of your posts, you are technically attaching your website to the content you are replying to or creating. If you write a forum post about dogs and link to your website about technology, then a search engine or bot may look at this as your website being related to dogs.
You may find yourself constantly replying to discussions or starting conversations that aren't related to your website. This alone makes nofollow incredible. While you can control the content you share, you cannot control the others users in the community. If their replies are low quality or off topic it does not help your page rank. If the forum discussion is full of user signatures (NOT using nofollow), it appears as if the page is some sort of poor attempt at old-school link generating.
Without nofollow on forums, companies such as Google and Bing will not treat that forum as a good source of linked content. This can be less true for very specific niche forums, or for very well-written content that has high quality replies that also aren't diluted with other links. However, it's always a bit safer to have nofollow attributes attached to your links on forums. You can still get traffic on your website from natural human clicks (the main source of attraction here at FP), so it's worth sharing your link(s) even if you aren't gaining anything in the major search ranks.
You should definitely not disregard the potential of linking to your website in useful replies of your own across the internet's many blogs, forums, and social networks. If your site relates to the content, even if nofollow is being used you can definitely benefit from sharing the URL. I didn't want to jump into the fine details of SEO here, such as the differences between linking to your homepage versus a specific page or article, but I hope to have helped some readers here (either in the FP community or as a guest coming from a search engine). This article accurately explains why nofollow links are good for a forum or blog owner and the community members, but if you do have more questions I would be happy to answer here!
