Does Google recognise “nofollow” links?

nofollow links seo First of all, in short the answer is “Yes, Google recognises nofollow links and can pass trust vote”!Now let me give a short introduction about nofollow links for those who are new to it. Nofollow is a link attribute used to instruct search engine crawlers to not follow that link. By default, search engines follow all links found in a webpage. But if you want to prevent search engines to not follow or crawl some links for preventing to pass link juice then you can do so by using rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Now we all know that nofollow links don’t pass any link juice or anchor text across the link. Ok, let’s come to the point – so does it make any sense to build “nofollow” links as far as SEO is concerned? Here are why it’s definitely makes sense to build nofollow links as a part of your entire link building efforts –

Recognisable to all search engines including Google –

If you give a closure look to the link section after logging to your Google Webmaster Tools account, you should find that Google is counting links from the web pages with nofollow attribute! I guess you already have a Twitter and Facebook account and you promote your site through these platforms and you know links from Twitter, Facebook are all marked with the nofollow attribute automatically. BUT you would see that Google Webmaster Tools is displaying the incoming links from the web pages with nofollow attribute including Facebook, Twitter, nofollow blogs, article aggregators etc. So, should there be any further doubt on that topic?

Trust vote –

By now, you should be agree that Google and other leading search engines can detect all your incoming links irrespective of the link attribute. So eventually if the search engines detect that you have a link from a highly relevant page then that passes a hidden trust vote to your site. The thing matters here is that search engines know about your site’s link source and link source from a authority domain or relevant page passes trust vote regardless of the link attribute.

Natural link structure –

Nofollow links are an absolute must to make your total link structure natural to the eyes of search engines. If you focus to build only “dofollow” (or links without the “nofollow” attribute) links that would be suspicious to the search engines. So you just need to maintain a balance between followed and not followed links for best SEO benefits.

So, some nofollow links are valuable as well for SEO – PROVED 😉