In the comments of my post, Understanding Follow Tags a great question was asked that I thought I’d give special attention to with a blog post. It’s relevant, it’s useful, and there are many theories to it.

So, let’s jump into it.

Lisa asked: Does “no follow” affect SERPs at all?

My initial answer is simple: yes and no. Let’s discuss both.

The point of the no follow tag within a link structure is not to “vote” for a website, at least in Google’s eyes. I’m not going to get into great detail about that here, I’ve already done that in the previous post. If you don’t understand follow tags, check out that post before reading this one.

Your website is listed in search engine result pages in accordance with the following:

• Keywords
• PageRank

First, you should be optimizing your blog posts/website content with keywords that search engines will pick up and associate with your blog. To get together these keywords for your site, I highly recommend a simple process: think like someone searching the web.

If you wanted to know how to improve your Technorati authority, how would you search that? Chances are you’ll go to your search engine of preference and type in “how to improve Technorati authority.” Right?

When you have written a blog post on Technorati authority, you’ll show up in the search engine result pages (SERPs) after your website has been crawled for new content.

Now, how you’re listed in the results pages is based on the priority that Google sees your site. You know what Google thinks of your site based on the PageRank that your site has.

The higher your PageRank on a scale from 0 to 10, the better you will rank in the SERPs.

Here’s the other side.

Google wants to know that they can trust YOU. They do that by picking up those keywords in your posts, seeing how many people link back to your blog/site, and that you are responsible with your linking.

To be responsible with your linking, to Google, means that you don’t allow every single link you give out to be followed. And the ones that you do follow you’re acknowledging that you like that site, you believe the site is trustworthy, and they are a “good neighborhood.”

These indicators to Google will help, in theory, increase your PageRank.

We then go back to, the better your PageRank, the better you will rank in the SERPs.

Do not call me an expert. However, based on the information I have read and found on this, I believe what I’m telling you to be the truth.

There have been theories however, that even pages without PageRank pass “Google juice,” or PageRank along to the site they’re linking too. I’m not sure if that’s true.

I do certainly know that it’s true to rank in the SEPRs without any PageRank at all. The catch however is where you are ranking without any PageRank? Are you on page one or page twenty-five for the search results?

Obviously, all of us would like to be on page one. Clearly we won’t all be.

So, based on all this information, I suppose our answer is really yes. The use of the no follow tag does affect the SERPs because it is one less vote for a website to be placed in the SERPs for the keywords the linked site is using.

This doesn’t mean that a website that has been linked to with the no follow tag will never be listed in the SERPs. I believe it simply means that a website linked to repeatedly with the no follow tag will not rank as high in the SERPs as their competitors.

My suggestion, for ranking in the SERPs is to be clear about your post topic by using keywords that are commonly used for that specific topic. Think like someone using the search engine, not the search engine.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine, Google, PageRank, SERPs, Technorati Authority, Searching