: Should I put rel="nofollow" on author link? We have just launched a new ecommerce shop. At the very bottom there is an anchor linking to our company website (a little advertisement, if you

@Bryan171

You can set nofollow to any external link, but do it noway to your author links (links with rel="author" or ?rel=author).

If author link is nofollowed, G will not be able to correctly calculate relation between the site and the author, and this causes loosing of author trust (if the page is trustful) and page trust (if the author is trustful).

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@Lengel546

Putting the nofollow attribute to all those links (which are from an external source) is the best practice of SEO. You have to put the nofollow attributes. It will not effect on your PageRank because it is not updated anymore.

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@Alves908

The seo experts told us to put rel="nofollow" to all external links.


Trying to massage PR (for want of a better term) in this way sounds like a very outdated concept to me. Is e-Commerce any different in this respect? If a site is worth linking to it should be "follow".

Generally, rel="nofollow" should only be used on paid-for or untrusted (ie. user-submitted) links. Unnatural links or links that only serve to advertise (comparable to "paid-for") should also be nofollow.


Should I put rel=“nofollow” on author link?


I would consider adding nofollow to your site backlink. This is of low quality anyway and is unlikely to count positively towards your sites SEO. As you openly state, it is "a little advertisement" and therefore unnatural. The reason for this link is to simply to allow the few site visitors who are interested to find out the developer, not to directly benefit the developers site SEO. If you notice on the "best" sites, they don't include such a backlink at all.

In the following Google Hangouts (at 32:35) from 5 May 2014, John Mueller is asked a similar question (backlinks to developer's site in footer) but on a much bigger scale. tl;dr It's safer to use nofollow on these links.

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@Bryan171

Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link's target in the search engine's index.

From Google's Search Console help page: Use rel="nofollow" for specific links:


This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap.

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