The common misunderstanding of nofollow and its true significance for SEO

First, we need to know how to use the nofollow label before we start to enter the topic. I believe there are still a lot of SEOer who do not know much about this label. As shown in the following figure:

 

So what is the true meaning of this label? I think many people have the same idea as the author at the beginning. I think that using this label can control the weight of the site and prevent links under this label from receiving the weight, in this way, the weight can be well reserved for other links.

This idea has been deeply rooted in many SEOer ideas. When I first came into contact with him, I was also in an article about friendship links using it for deception. However, I recently saw an article about Google's explanation of the nofollow tag and found that my opinion was wrong.

The concept of Nofollow tag was initially proposed by Google in, at that time, the official explanation for the appearance of this tag was mainly to cope with the out-of-the-box spam cheating means, that is, the search engine spider will not crawl the links under the nofollow tag. Currently, when a large number of spam links are sent to a forum or blog, the program can automatically generate and add the nofollow tag, as long as the search engine finds these tags, it will not crawl these external chains, so it can well process the junk external chains.

So where are the mistakes in nofollow labels?

First, let's take an example. If we add page A to your site, the PR value is 10, and there are ten links on this page, then we average, each link on the page can theoretically be obtained (10/10 = 1) 1. If we use the nofollow label for the five links in the ten links, that is, the weights of the five links will be cut down for transmission, in theory, the weights of the five links on the current page can be: 10/5 = 2, but in reality, the weight of each link on the page is still 1, the nofollow label does not control the transfer of weights. For more information, see the following figure.

 

The search engine is not stupid. It does not give you the opportunity to use this label to control the weight and ultimately control the page ranking. Simply put, although the Nofollow label does not pass the weight to the corresponding link, it does not transfer the weight to another link.

In turn, what is the true significance of the nofollow tag for our optimization?

Although Nofollow does not control the weight, there must be some SEO functions for our site. For example, our sites are usually not subject to many pages that are not important to SEO, such as customer service help, registration, logon, and user protocols, but cannot be ignored. From the search engine perspective, there is no value for these pages. At the same time, if there are many pages, they will also have a negative impact on your optimization.

For example, the "post" button on our forum basically has this button on every page, if the link on this button is not blocked using the nofollow tag on your site, the search engine will crawl to this link on every page. This will reduce the crawling efficiency of search engine spider sites. Especially for new sites.