WARNING: Expert says having "no-follow" links on a page hurts your rankings

1) That article is full of crap and from 2017. If that had happened, many others would have been talking about it long ago.

2) Google changed how they handled nofollow links back in 2008. All that garbage in that article about how you could conserve linkjuice by adding a nofollow tag to a link has not been true in over a decade.

If the author is really an "SEO consultant" at Yoast, they need to hire some better consultants.

I assume we are talking about internal links here. The nofollow tag really doesn't do a thing to help you with internal links. The page it is pointing to does not get any page rank passed to it but at the same time, the link diminishes the amount of page rank passed to other linked-to pages from that page. The old practice of page/link sculpting does not work anymore.

I'm hoping that he just isn't the best writer in the world and doesn't really believe that a nofollow tag wipes out the page rank of any page that has nofollow links on it. If that was the case, nobody would add affiliate links to their site. It could have been written better, for sure. I believe what he meant to say is that the link value to the page with the no-follow tag disappears. He says that there is no reason to add a nofollow tag to an internal link. The page rank from that page that is passed to all of the pages that are linked-to from it is going to divided by the total number of links on the page, whether they are nofollowed or not. He recommends not having the link at all if you are going to nofollow it because the number of links will be fewer, meaning that more page rank will be passed to the other pages when there are fewer links. The only thing that is going to keep a page from being indexed is a no-index tag.

Lol, that's just stupid.

Having no follow links within the page doesn't affect your rankings but it can be a source of target traffic from your users.

What the heck? You'd think Yoast would have writers that actually know what they are talking about?

"Now it seems that the link value for the whole page completely disappears when you add a 'no-follow' tag to a link on it. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of 'no-following' some of the links."

This makes no sense at all. Adding a NoFollow tag to a single outbound link on a page will do the square root of nothing to the other links on that page.

If anything, the other links should theoretically pass more authority, but I doubt it's anything significant and I don't think anyone should waste their time thinking that deep into this when you could be improving the user experience on the page in question or building inbound links through outreach.

IMHO - I would ignore the advice on this article and focus on SEO tactics that have been proven to work over time like content writing and outreach.

Fundamentally, this would make all blog comments worthless. Would Google really want to do that? If so, the article is true and accurate. If not, the article is not accurate. Come on now; we know the answer

Okay, I stand corrected. LOL! Makes total sense. I was assuming the NoFollow would not pass anything and therefore you'd have x/4 as in the top right image above.

Dividing the link authority up and adding it to the followed links makes more sense to me if Google's goal is to encourage the use of NoFollow to prevent link spam. You'd think they would assign MORE value to the followed links. Then again, encouraging "link sculpting" is probably equally manipulative.

Not afraid to admit I learned something about SEO today even though I've been doing this for a few years now. It's just something I've never put much time into researching. Thanks for the killer graphic! :-)

Nofollow was invented by google to combat link spam.

Fools exposed weaknesses in that, google closed a hole or two.

Nofollow is pretty much useless on a real page.

If you don't trust a link, why have it?

This is not in regard to global nofollow like twitter. That's global nofollow for survival purposes.

If you have a regular page, with a few links, internal included....what's the nofollow for?
To tell google you don't trust a link....or your page has webspam?
Since it does not save any PR passed... it's an almost useless tag on a webpage.

(nofollow is not noindex)

Blog comments (and links) are completely useless for any ranking, and they sure can foul up a webpage.

Google wants you to use nofollow because they have been a tad lousy at eliminating webspam.
They want YOU to do it.

Ditto for disavow.... invented to keep webmasters entertained at doing "something" that they think is useful... and eliminating pressure off of any customer service inquiries.

Like the hamster on the wheel thinking he's going somewhere.

Webmasters think they are getting somewhere by using nofollow and disavow.... or variations of them.

Paul

If you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, for example, you don't want to leak link value to your login page - that page doesn't need to rank high in the search results.

You used to be able to prevent losing link value to unimportant links by giving them a 'no-follow' tag. A 'no-follow' tag asks Google not to follow the link: so no link value is lost. Now you might think: "I'm going to 'no-follow' less important links to give the most important links more link value." While this worked in the past, Google has become smarter.

Now it seems that the link value for the whole page completely disappears when you add a 'no-follow' tag to a link on it. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of 'no-following' some of the links.

Hilarious. Yoast must have been auditioning for a comedy spot on one of the late might shows. The sculpting part was bonus. That went out nearly a decade ago.

On Moz no-follow links seem to count towards the DA score

No it doesn't matters that having no follow backlinks on your website affect your rankings.

It wasn't news for me. Many people have already known about it.