: How important is that we use REL="NOFOLLOW" in external links? I hear to improve pagerank and other SEO factors, we should use rel="nofollow" on links to external sites. Why is this? So if

@Jamie184

To add to @Stephens answer : we should also use no-follow in case where we have a well indexed page A having internal links of my site say B & C and these pages B & C are no-indexed means i don't want crawler to crawl them.

According to google's recommendation if you have links on your page that are non-indexed, then a good practice is to let crawler know up-front that these pages should not be followed/crawled by the crawler.

I am just presenting a use case, ideally adding such links itself should be avoided.

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@Chiappetta492

I don't know about nofollow,
But say something about dofollow.
If your blog or site is big, you can use dofollow everywhere, and even in spam comments with links.
There are many experiments with Google through years (Russian blog), and it's doesn't matter! (Dofollow or nofollow).

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@Eichhorn148

The only time that it is mandatory to use rel="nofollow" on a link is if the link is sponsored. If somebody paid you for the link, or if the link is part of an exchange, Google might penalize your site for NOT including a rel="nofollow" on it.

You should also apply nofollow to links that are created by your users without review. Otherwise, they have incentive to spam your site.

Besides these two cases, using rel="nofollow" doesn't seem to help you, and might even hurt you.

If all the external links on your site are rel="nofollow" then Google might decide that your site has nothing but paid links. You would appear to be an affiliate and Google's algorithms are not known for being kind to affiliate sites.

Clear external linking may even help. Having relevant external links that are used by your visitors is a sign that you are an authority site. Google has been claiming for years that they want to send more traffic to authority sites.

Five years ago, nofollow might have been able to be used to hoard pagerank for your site. This is no longer the case. Now when you link externally, your site loses PageRank whether or not you use nofollow. The PageRank that is "lost" doesn't actually seem to hurt your rankings as far as I can tell, so linking doesn't seem to hurt.

If you have external links to many different sites, and you are worried about helping one or two competitors that you are linking to, I would consider using nofollow for just those competitors. Don't go overboard with nofollow. Make sure you have plenty of clean external links to balance it out.

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