Can I Remove NoFollow on Links?

What Is No Follow?

The nofollow attribute (rel="nofollow") of a link was introduced by Google several years ago in an effort to help combat spam. Because back links are such an integral part of organic SEO, spammers would seek out pages that contained information relevant to content they were writing (and often times completely irrelevant) and would proceed to slander guest books with a slew of spam the links.

Search engine spiders would see these links and pass page rank from the guestbook page to the spammer's site. As a result, not only would legitimate sites lose page rank, the scammer sites would gain pagerank, and therefore popularity and a resulting unwarranted and undeserved increase in the search rankings.

How to Use NoFollow

Most blog platforms and content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal let you automatically tag links from anonymous posters (such as guestbook comments) with the no follow attribute. As a result, search engine spiders will not follow the link and PageRank will not be passed on (it should be noted, however, that Yahoo appears to follow these links anyways).

Is NoFollow the Solution to Spam?

The nofollow attribute has definitely helped combat spam, even if not all websites and bloggers are using it, are even aware of it. So this begs the question - is there any way to remove a nofollow link, or to force search engines to follow your links?

How to Remove NoFollow from Links

It's funny to see how many people spend their time trying to trick the search engines. In this case, trying to force them to follow links, which in many cases are simply promoting spam. It turns out that despite all the attempts to remove no follow (such as adding rel="follow" to links and placing links within deprecated anchor tags), there is no way, as far as we know, to remove no follow from a link. Instead, we would like to show you a more effective way of getting your content indexed, and show you how to improve your search engine rankings.

Content Is King

If there is a bottom line or a rule of thumb to SEO, or just one thing we'd like you to take away from all this, it's that content is king. What do we mean by this? As we've stated before, the goal of search engines (such as Google, which at last estimate dominates the market with a nearly 70% share) is to improve the user's experience. In other words, they are trying to help the user find what they are seeking. According to Google, their mission is to "organize the world's information." Their mission is not to cater to those writing the content are those trying to get their content rank. They simply want quality content to be easily found.

Therefore, if you focus your efforts on writing quality content, and you do enough of it, and you updated often, the rest will take care of itself. There are plenty of proven cases of blogs that have gained massive amounts of traffic simply by posting new and fresh content on a regular basis. Of course, it helps to write content catering to what people are actually looking for. You may get highly linked for a page, but if no one is looking for the content you have on the page, it doesn't matter if your number one - you won't get many visitors. Browse around the site to learn how to find out what people are looking for, how to optimize your site structure to help you organize your information so it can be more readily indexed by search engine spiders, and how to manage a search marketing campaign that will help you capitalize on your writing efforts.

Forget About "Black Hat" SEO

Oh yeah, and forget about all the little tricks that "Black hat SEO's" worry about on a daily basis - such as removing no follow from links. Focus on your website content in your users first, in the search engines will take note.