Google recently changed the way it treats the no-follow links. You can use the recent changes to the "no-follow" link to improve your search results.
The "no-follow" HTML link attribute was originally used to tell google not to associate your site with or crawl the linked page you are linking to.
Some webmasters used this to block search engines from visiting dynamic pages like the thankyou page, admin and login pages, community pages e.t.c
On September 10th, 2019, Google announced major changes in how it treats the no-follow links. While previously these kinds of links were a signal not to use the link in its search algorithms, Google indicated that these would now serve as hints on which content to be crawled or left out.
As Google becomes more intelligent, it has the ability to understand which content is relevant and which one is not.
Here are three ways to use the no-follow to your advantage.
1 Improve ranking by fixing broken Wikipedia links
Its been a known fact within the Search Engine Community that some no-follow links do have positive results for the pages they link to.
This has been particularly true for links from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a no-follow link policy and as such spammers have always shied away from it. It also has a spam-free and strict editing policy to prevent people from abusing its pages with spammy links.
Your edits to Wikipedia are more likely to be accepted if you are mending a broken link. Find broken links using a tool like wikigrabber or using pro-search techniques in google search like
site:wikipedia.org [your niche keyword] + “dead link”.
Write your own replacement article and provide your link as a fix.
2 Improve search ranking by leaving meaningful comments on blogs
Most sites automatically add the no-follow attribute to post comments. This is to discourage spammers from leaving irrelevant and low-quality comments for purposes of getting linkbacks. With this new algorithm change, Google could asses the link in the comment as relevant.
Write meaningful comments on the relevant blog posts and add a link to content that further lends weight to your arguments. Linking to unrelated content may not help much.
3 Improve search ranking by answering Stack Overflow questions.
Stack overflow is a gold mine for finding and measuring user interest in many topics. It's a community question-answer website with a user weighting mechanism for finding the correct answer.
We know that Google loves StackOverflow and respects its weighting system. As a matter of fact, parts of Google's own zero search results use stack overflow's accepted answer.
Find questions you can answer in a stack overflow. Provide a meaningful and well-explained answer and link to your article for details.
Stay away from black hat SEO
In all this, we emphasize quality content. Google is all for quality content and helpful links. Make sure that your links are relevant to the subject and provide valuable information. Contrary to that, your efforts to get high traffic will result in a high bounce rate which is an indication of poor quality content to Google.
Ayebare is the Chief Digital Strategists and co-founder Campaign.
He has more than 10 years of experience in the digital field.
He has worked with several fortune 500 companies worldwide in various Engineering and Website strategy disciplines.