Are you looking to build backlinks to your website to help in your search engine optimization efforts? Then you need to be aware of what is called a nofollow backlink. A nofollow backlink is one that Google bots don’t follow back to your website. If Google bots don’t follow the link, you don’t get any backlink benefit for your website. In other words, the backlink does not increase your search engine ranking.

Google primarily ranks a site based on the number and quality of backlinks. A backlink is just a link from another website that links back to YOUR website. Quality backlinks can be links from any trusted source, like the New York Times website, a major blog like the Huffington Post, or perhaps a university or government website. Even smaller, lesser-known websites can help your search engine rankings when they provide a link to your website. In fact, one of the easiest places to get a quick link is in the comments sections of major blogs. If you read an article and decide to comment on it, you will be asked if you want to provide a website. If you provide your website and the comment is approved, you have placed a backlink to your site on that blog!

But before you throw a party over having a new backlink, you better make sure it’s not a nofollow link. There are two easy ways to check for nofollow links. One way is to look at the comments section of a blog and copy the name of someone who made a comment and left a link to a website. Then view the source of that web page by right-clicking it and selecting view source. Then do a CTRL-F (search) for the commenter’s name. When you find the commenter’s name in the source code, you will also see the link to their website. If you see the term nofollow anywhere on that link, more specifically rel=”nofollow,” so blog comments are nofollows. The other way to quickly check for nofollow links is to use a program like the Google Chrome NoFollow plugin. This plugin highlights all links that are nofollow as you scroll through the web. It’s a very quick way to see which sites are giving away Google juice and which sites are not.

For example, take a look at this site, EzineArticles. All links in the main body of the article on EzineArticles are nofollow links. The links in the author box, however, are regular follow-up links. So the benefit to the author of writing the article is to get that backlink from a quality website like EzineArticles. Some other examples are how the Facebook news feed has all the nofollow links, just like any link found in the Twitter feeds. So, you may be wondering, why do people put links on these sites if they don’t get any backlink credit? The reason people put links in these nofollow areas is to generate organic traffic to a website (i.e. a real person clicking on the link instead of just a link for a Googlebot to follow) . This is also the benefit of commenting on a blog or article you like, even if the link you provide is nofollow. Obviously you and the blog readers are interested in similar topics. If you make an interesting comment based on the article, you may impress enough people to click your link and visit your website. The more traffic your website gets, the more Google will recognize your site as a popular site, without the backlink!

So when creating backlinks, make sure to check if the link will be followed or not followed. Because unless you are looking to drive organic traffic to your website from high traffic sites that get a lot of visibility, nofollow backlinks will not help you.