Regular links may still

[Audreythenurse]

Good day:

I understand guest articles are a good way to pass linkjuice and some authors have a link to their website on the "Author Bio" section of the article. These links are usually regular links.

However, I noticed that some of these sites (using wordpress) have several SEO plugins with the following settings:

Nofollow: Tell search engines not to spider links on this webpage.

My question is:

If the setting above was activated, I would assume the author's website link would look like a regular link but some other code could still be present in the page (ex, header) that would prevent this regular link from being followed. Therefore, the guest writer would not experience any linkjuice.

Any idea if there's a way of being able to see if this scenario is happening? What code would we look for?

[Audreythenurse]

I think it could be this code right here in the head section:

name="robots" content="index,nofollow"/>

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Audrey,

Understood. Short of blocking an entire page from being indexed via Robots.txt or noindex, I'm not aware of any other way that a link could be devalued - certainly not no-followed.

[Audreythenurse]

Hi Chris:

Thanks for the information but what you mentioned is not necessary what I am referring to. I want to know if there's a way that a link can appear WITHOUT the rel="nofollow" in it's specific code, but STILL BE a nofollow thanks to any additional code which might be hiding through the page or in the header of the page?

Is it possible? Or is the only way for a link to be no follow is for it to have the rel nofollow tag its code?

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Audrey,

What you're talking about here is the rel=nofollow element, commonly referred to as simply a "no-followed link".

This is something a lot of sites use in their blog comment sections to deter spammers because, as you point out, any spam links they drop in there will then be of less value to them.

Tagging a link as nofollow does indeed tell search engines not to pass that strength to the site being linked to, however, there is still benefit to these links assuming you're getting them in the right place. For example, the relevance of the link anchor to your website, the type of website the link is coming from, the quality of that site, where the link is located etc. You should also be earning quality referral traffic from these links if they're valuable too.

As for how to find them in the HTML, it will look something like the example below. The best way to find this is to right-click on a page you want to check, select View Source (or press Ctrl+U) then use Ctrl+F to find either the link anchor or the domain the link points to.

Followed link: Anchor Text

NoFollow link: Anchor Text

Nicole Kohler produced a great post in 2014 on this topic that's worth reading too.

I can't say that I've seen plugins that nofollow an Author's bio link by default but it's entirely possible. This is usually just done for comments.

By all means, a followed link is preferable but if the link placement is great (strong, relevant site that users are actually going to see) then don't shy away from it just because it's a nofollow!