• Link Building Best Practices , Friday, April 25, 2008 12:45 PM

Some of the hubbub around the pros and cons of "no follow" links--which tell the engines not to follow an outbound link on a Web site and to not include it in a page's overall ranking--versus ordinary "do follow" links has died down. But the Vertical Measures team has found that many clients are still concerned about the ratio of followed links to non-followed links--and have even insisted on link-building efforts that focus on followed links only. And the team says that those worries are unfounded.

First, the engines expect to see a balance of "no follow" and "do follow" links. And while there's no known ideal ratio, devoting all of a site's link building efforts to finding "do follow" links would be a misuse of the agency's time.

There has also been no conclusive proof that the Big Three engines aren't passing some PageRank through "no followed" links. And focusing on link juice itself actually eschews the real value of links--the increase in traffic they provide.

"Focus on getting links for traffic and you won't have to worry about it at all," the team says. "So much emphasis is placed on getting link juice for search engine rankings that many forget that the best links of all bring real traffic to your site."

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