No-Follow links contain a “nofollow” tag, which is designed to not pass link equity from the linking domain on to the destination domain.

These are primarily used to discourage marketers from building links in lazy ways, such as in comments sections of websites.

They are also used for links coming from Social Media or PR sites as well, as purchasing link equity is discouraged in organic search.

Why No-Follow Links Matter In Search Engine Optimization

Webmasters should learn the instances where no-follow links are appropriate for organic search in order to ensure that all links coming from their properties abide by the rules.

This way, there is no chance of having any indexation issues for your content.

When looking at another page that links to your content, no follow links also add in a new dimension.

Let’s say that a example.com/article-a links to yoursite.com/article-b, as well as two other sites in their article.

One of the two other sites happens to be a paid partner of theirs, so they mark the link to it “nofollow”.

Now, instead of receiving link equity that was split between all three URLs referenced on the page, you are only splitting it with one other site, 50:50 instead of 33:33:33.