In 2005, Google introduced the no follow link which all webmasters know is of huge importance – and those who are in the link building pay attention to this attribute. If a site uses the “nofollow” attribute for their external links, then Google will not award any credit in the form of Page Rank to the recipient website. Any boosting of your website’s ranking comes from followed links which pass link juice. If you are spending a lot of time building your links but not seeing any increase in Page Rank, you may be working with sites which have blocked search engines from taking those links into consideration for calculating your search ranking. If that is the case, you really need to get an SEO to revamp your strategy and help create a better set of sites to target.

The reason the no follow exists at all is abuse. Spammers used to get links in anywhere to point to their site, even if their site was rubbish. This is exactly why sites like Wikipedia started adding a nofollow tag for all external links – to protect their website from spammers who posted  junk on the Wikepedia website just for the sake of back links. This used to be one of the biggest problems they had. There are a large and ever increasing number of blogs which also do this to avoid spam comments. If you have been spending time commenting in blogs as part of your SEO strategy, you must know whether the nofollow tag has been enabled or you are wasting your time in most cases.

Different search engines respond to the nofollow attribute differently. Google neither follows nor indexes the link that is tagged with the nofollow attribute. Yahoo, yes they still have a search engine, assigns no value. Bing doesn’t consider links that have the nofollow attribute in their search engine ranking either. Even though your search ranking will not improve with links that come with nofollow the odds are they will help you generate some traffic which of course helps in other ways.

On your own site, you can use the nofollow attribute if you are promoting an affiliate link, since using a nofollow attribute is what the affiliate programs expect you to do anyway. They only want you to send them targeted traffic and they pay a fee for each purchase that your visitors make. This way you can do that type of program and you don’t have to dilute your own ‘link juice’ to do it.

When you have space for banner ads, you can assign a no follow attribute to them as well. NOTE: Being paid specifically for placing the banner in a page with particular pagerank without a nofollow tag is supplying paid links to a customer and means you are helping them with black hat tactics. If someone buys links from you expecting back links from a page with good PR to boost his or her website’s ranking as well, JUST SAY NO. This will save you from a lot of headaches later on!

Many webmasters have very little idea of how to improve PageRank even though it really is not that difficult to do.  You won’t be able to go from PR0 to PR5 in two months, but you can gradually build toward getting there by following some simple steps.  What is the answer to the question, “How do I improve my website’s PageRank? Website owners have been trying to improve PageRank, or PR since they day it became public – and have asked this question over and over. Many spend several years to reach their dream PR number. What is the trick that will get the desired results?

Google uses somewhere in the area of 200 factors to determine rank for websites and to assign PR. Getting a good PR is achievable only by using an organic approach – gaaming the system never lasts long. One of the most important factors to boost your site’s PageRank is link building. Google values websites with many relevant back links and even assesses your website’s importance to a certain extent using the number of other websites on the web that are linking to you.

Why does Google use backlinks as one of the factors? Offline, authors who want to establish their point while writing will refer to the works of other writers. They will also do this for credibility’s sake. A writer’s work was often assessed based on the extensiveness of its usage in the literary world by the other respected writers. Getting links from authority sites and other websites with good PR, is  an indicator of the importance of your own website. This is one of the main reasons why people spend thousands of dollars on link building and in getting links from websites with high PR. The key to it all is that they links need to be relevant – they can’t just be random links from around the web.

It has also known that the age of the website has a certain say in the PR. What has the age of the website to do with the PR? A  lot of webmasters started misusing their knowledge of linking by launching temporary sites creating a network for links. To curb this misuse, Google’s algorithm has a way of associating the age of the website to its PR. This way, a load of irrelevant links from brand new sites count for very little if anything at all, while a single link from an authority site that has been around awhile counts for much more.

Try to get links from websites that are relevant – we cannot say this enough times. It makes more sense for a logo design company to get links from a web design company than from a car wash website. Links from websites that are relevant to your website will be able to boost your PageRank better than links from unrelated websites. Sticking with the relevant linking practices will boost your PR much faster than trying to fool the algorithm with thousands of temporary links.

If you ask most webmasters, they will tell you that they consider themselves lucky if they manage to obtain keyworded domain names, as all the keyword domains in general have been grabbed already. This means that unless you have a very, very niche oriented industry or a new concept that you are marketing, finding a keyword domain names is really difficult. Even when they can be found, the expense can be enormous.

There are plenty of companies and individuals that are more than willing to pay a lot of money to get these domain names. Is it worth paying huge prices for such domain names, and do you really need to have keyword domain names?  Not all SEO professionals will agree, but many SEO experts believe that keyword domain names are weighted – at a minimum – when it comes to search engine placements. History does seem to bear that out – or it could be that people spending  lot of money on those domains don’t skimp when it comes to SEO. A number of SEO experts also feel that one of the search engine ranking factors has to do with the domain name.

Here are some of the things we can say we are sure of. We know that Google gives importance to the age of the domain – there is not even up for debate. Google also grades on keywords in the text, tags, and captions that appear on a site. Based on this, it does make a lot of sense that Google might give importance to domain names as well – it does seem logical. Exactly how, however, is still something of a speculation. Quite a few webmasters have tried to make use of keyword domain names and even spend thousands of dollars getting keyword domain names.

Here’s the skinny on it – you probably won’t lose anything by selecting keyword domain names, as there are other advantages associated with such domain names. One of the greatest advantages of getting keyword domain names occurs when people link to your website, as they will most probably be using keywords to link to your main pages. If the keywords and domain name matches, it can bring additional credit to your website – since highly contextual links to your website are always helpful. Google absolutely loves this!

Keyword domain names are also helpful. SEOs already know that Google and other search engines look for keywords in strategic places. It’s logical to think that search engines will consider keywords in the URLs and domain names as an important aspect to find relevant websites for a given search as part of their algorithm. There are also a number of people who link to websites using just the URL of the website rather than using anchor text. Keyword domains will stand to gain in this regard, because in the link itself your keyword will be present. It may not be the best way to have your link out there, but it sure isn’t the worst.

This  does not mean that non-keyword domains do not rank well, because many do, but that it appears keyword domains have better rate of success on the whole. However, spending thousands on a highly keyworded domain name should only be done if you are confident it will aid you enough to recoup the cost and you can really afford it.