No Follow Links

Hi All,

A rather basic question! I understand that some forums and Wikipedia in particularly have 'no follow' links on their website. Can I just quickly ask whether the source below provides a 'no follow' links in terms of SEO. If my website was to appear on this website's front page would I get SEO benefits? Also for the remainder of the site, would be get SEO benefits i.e. an excellent external link into my website from a high traffic and important page. Any comments welcome!

img src="http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/v3.lifehacker.com/img//syndication.png" width="119" height="18" alt="Syndication" />
<p id="syndication">
<img src="http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/v3.lifehacker.com/img/feed_icon.png" alt="Feed icon" align="absmiddle" style="border: 0;" /> <a href="http://www.lifehacker.com/index.xml" title="RSS 2.0 syndication" rel="nofollow">Full Content</a> (with ads)<br />
<img src="http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/v3.lifehacker.com/img/feed_icon.png" alt="Feed icon" align="absmiddle" style="border: 0;" /> <a href="http://www.lifehacker.com/excerpts.xml" title="RSS 2.0 syndication" rel="nofollow">Partial Content</a> (ad-free)<br />
<img src="http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/v3.lifehacker.com/img/feed_icon.png" alt="Feed icon" align="absmiddle" style="border: 0;" /> <a href="http://www.lifehacker.com/xml/comments" title="RSS 2.0 syndication" rel="nofollow">Comments</a>
</p>

The 'rel="nofollow"' in each of the href's makes all of them "nofollow" links. Thus they are worthless in terms of SEO.
If the site with these links is visited frequently, it could bring you lots of normal visitors, though. But as I said, no positive effect in terms of SEO can be expected here.

If the 'rel="nofollow"' was missing, you would also have to check the meta data of the page. If the page itself contains the directive
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow"/>
then ALL links from that page are nofollow links.

...that said, other search engines besides Google (for instance Yahoo!) are not afraid of following/indexing/counting rel=nofollow links. But if you're mainly aiming at traffic from Google, then building links with nofollow on them has no direct benefit for SEO

Hi,

Thanks for the comments- I am trying to optimise solely for Google, and this is crucial as we want SEO benefits from these pages. Can I just clarify that the source I added for the above question was at the bottom of the page, and not in the meta-description etc. Does this have an effect? If anyone could double-check the source fromit's original material at www.lifehacker.com www. lifehacker. com that would be very appreciated. This is a rather important issue at the moment at my company and want to get it exactly right!

Thanks for the previous comments- much appreciated!

No matter where a link with 'rel="nofollow"' is placed in the source code, you will not get an SEO benefit for Google out of it.

Also check the robots.txt is not blocking that page.

Yeah, that's the one I always forget to check - thanks for the reminder.

I've noticed that nofollow links can still get a new site indexed, but not ranked very high. So, they're not ignored completely, but they're not worth very much.