Google Links : To Follow or Not To Follow

SEO Optimization has always been a very new and ever learning and evolving subject. As most of the rules and supposed "regulations" have always been never directly explained in a clear guide or manual by the SEs themselves, we are often playing catch up to most of these constant changes than ever being able to master them.

One SE that always stays ahead of the pack is most definitely Google. Recent studies by ComCast show that more than 58% of all web searches are satisfied by Google's voracious servers. It is therefore very important that you know what there is to this SE at least more than any other SE out there.

One of the recent changes that really caught the industry half-asleep was the PR slapping for many sites which were obviously using paid links to get their traffic and "net"-worth. Whereas the other major talking point for last year was the "no-follow" links system.

Even I, was confused to a fair extent about the usage and need for such no-follow links.

Until lately, with help from Matt Cutts and other SE material that I had gathered, here is what it simply means;

"Follow" links or links by default do actually cause the search engine spiders and crawling scripts to traverse through your link and end up in the resulting site. For this though, the SE might choose to give credit to the referred site for the backlink that your site might have given. Now, if your site has a very good PR and you just want to leave a comment on your site with reference to another site but don't want to give any "credits" to the referred site from the link, you can use the "nofollow" tag in your link.

Quite simply, all links actually would end up in the referred site. However, "nofollow" links ensure that the search engines don't pick up that link and credit "referral points" for the referred site.

If you however have a site with not much credits standing, you shouldn't really be worrying about these extra taggings.