But, what if a webmaster wants to link out to another site but not send away its valuable PageRank or trust? That's where nofollow links come into play. A nofollow link is a link that search engines do not record as a link, so no PageRank passes. By contrast, a dofollow link is a link that does pass PageRank. Generally, you want to secure dofollow inbound links to your website when pursuing your link building strategy. That said, nofollow links are an important part of the SEO landscape: they are handy devices in a webmaster's toolbox and can help fine tune your search strategy, as we will learn.
Here is how nofollow links came into being. Because the effect of PageRank and inbound links is so important to rankings, the Internet became (and still is) fairly polluted with link spam. Link spam is simply a low-value link placed on another website for the purpose of either attracting traffic or PageRank. Common locations...