What is No-Follow and why do you need it
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After my SEO Tips for Squidoo yesterday, I had a few comments asking some great questions. One was by ‘A Course in Miracles’ and it read as follows:
Hi Captain,
What exactly is “No-follow your affiliate links� Can I do that with my Amazon links for instance? Thanks for your great posts. Really worth reading.
No-Follow Links:
Adding ‘no follow’ to a link effectively tells the search engine spiders to stay away from that link and don’t give any ‘credit’ to the destination of that link. Google has announced on separate occasions that their preference is to have links that could be considered paid endorsements as no-follow. With affiliate links it is painfully obvious that the links are an endorsement of some kind because they usually go to nonsense domains with lots of consonants strung together. There’s no since in giving that domain a bunch of link juice!
This is the main reason that the links in the ‘money making’ modules (ebay, amazon, cafepress, etc) are ‘nofollow’.
Does it really make a difference?
A few months ago, I replaced the vast majority of my affiliate links on lenses to include ‘nofollow’. Since then, I’ve noticed an increase in traffic. whether this has to do with tagging the links correctly or from other factors it’s difficult to say.
I’m pretty certain that at the very least it doesn’t HURT anything.
How to add Nofollow:
regular links will look something like this:
< a href=”http://squidtop.com”>Squidtop - Blogging for Lensmasters</a>
to add nofollow, simply add ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ after the quotes around the URL like this:
< a href=”http://squidtop.com” rel=”nofollow”>Squidtop - Blogging for Lensmasters</a>
Try it out and let me know if it helps your lenses!
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Comments
So, if I understand you correctly, I don’t need to worry about the links that I select within an Amazon module etc. Only additional links that I set within any text window to paid endorsements pose a problem. Does that also go for the Amazon Product Link and for the Amazon link through your service on SquidUtils?
Thanks again.
Alban
Good info, Captain. Should the nofollow tag be added to banner/graphical affiliate links as well or only on text links?
Thanks
Yes, I give affiliate links since several month ago and my lens is on the top search term in google (of course I make several backlink to the lens too). Nofollow give huge benefits to seo 
Mac,
Yes, I add it to graphical links as well, but just the ‘href’ part not the img ’src’ part (I don’t think you can nofollow an image source…)
Course in Miracles,
Links w/o nofollow aren’t necessarily a huge problem, it’s just something to be aware of.
Thanks for the tip in this post and your other recent post about traffic. As I update my lenses, I’ll be adding “nofollow” to my lenses.
I came across this post accidentally, I will be giving your suggetion a try.
But, I wanted to confirm something about the HTML (since I don’t really know HTML)
I assume there is not a space between the “URL” and rel=”nofollow” ?
[...] I’m going to be doing some lens tweaking. I ran across a blog post by Captain Squid (aka Loyalis) discussing the option of adding “no follow†to your affiliate links. Ok, now why [...]
Ok, I just finished the last additions of the “no follow” tip. It wasn’t as hard as i thought it would be. A bit time consuming but I was able to do it while watching the tube with DH (quality time - LOL).
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I’ve started to nofollow all of my affiliate links, and have noticed a boost in traffic as well. Like you said, it’s difficult to say if the boost is from that or from other stuff I’ve been doing, but I agree that it doesn’t hurt at all to do it.
Great post, as usual.