SEO – How To Hoard Your Link Juice

When talking about search engine optimization, or SEO, we are always looking for ways to draw traffic to our site but we should also be concerned with keeping traffic and, just as importantly, keeping the search engines on our site.

Decole Juice Boy

I recently ran across a great post from one of my favorite readers, Adam Pieniazek of The 42nd Estate Network, about the NoFollow rule and it brought up a question for me on when to use the NoFollow rule and why.   Adam was cool enough to do whole post titled When To NoFollow Links, which I’ve found very helpful.  I’d like to share a bit of what I learned from him here.

Adam pointed out that you can keep some of your link juice to yourself by specifically using the NoFollow tip when linking to the big websites that don’t need the traffic like the big news sites or your social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

I recently did a post on Gina Bianchini, co-founder of the social network Ning, where I mentioned and linked to her quote from CNET News.   At the time I didn’t understand about NoFollow, so Google has been using my link juice to feed the huge CNET News site that doesn’t even need it.  Now I can go back and reset that link to the NoFollow and hoard my juice!  Hey, a girl’s gotta be smart, right?

The way you do that is by adding a little HTML code to your post.  If you’re using Wordpress you will go to the HTML editing version of your post and wrap the NoFollow code around your link.  So here’s the difference:

A regular hyperlink would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.marketlikeachick.com/”>Market Like A Chick</a>

A NoFollow Link would look like this:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.marketlikeachick.com/>Market Like A Chick</a>

Another point Adam brought up was that Wordpress automatically does a NoFollow on all comment links. Since then I have installed the DoFollow plugin that reversed the WP NoFollow rule for comments so my readers are given the love they deserve. My feelings are that if someone is kind enough to read your blog and leave a RELEVANT comment, out of respect, you should return the favor and give them some SEO love by following back.  This gives their blog a boost by allowing the search engines to follow the link back to their blog.

Now, if you are getting a lot of the idiotic comments like I’ve mentioned here before such as  “nice blog.  I leave comment, hope your read mine too and leave comment”…it shows no interest in your blog at all and doesn’t deserve your link love.  That’s just some jerk using a bot to post lame comments on every blog they can find in the hopes of stealing some of your link juice.

How do you feel about the Follow or NoFollow debate?  Have you used the NoFollow strategy on your site?

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Tagged as:  Blogging · Increase Traffic · Online Marketing · SEO