Never Heard of NoFollow Tags? Then Please Follow.

Lately, for anyone who's been running an online business as an affiliate marketer, there's been a growing importance of SEO, by doing things like link building to generate traffic. The Wealthy Affiliates do a great job at explaining this.

There's probably been more strategies for building links than I could count with the numeric system, including things like forum posting, social bookmarking, blog commenting, link exchanges, and all sorts of things.

So What are NoFollow Tags?
Well in basic terms, NoFollow tags are html link attributes website owners can use that will tell search engines to act as if they never saw the backlink when determining page ranks. What does this mean? Well this means that within a matter of seconds, a site owner can add a noFollow attribute to the link you placed on their site and within a matter of seconds, you lose your backlink.

Then How Do You Build Traffic Now?
Building traffic isn't going to be as straight forward as it once used to be. Before, you could simply submit a page to a bunch of social bookmarking sites over a duration of time and your page rank would go up the next time Google updated everything. Before you could leave useless comments on all sorts of blogs and you could gain backlinks left and right within a matter of seconds, but not any more.

Now most blogs and a lot of social bookmarking sites use nofollow tags. So posting useless info to get backlinks won't help you at all. If you want to get traffic these days, you have to make sure that comments you add to blog posts are extremely useful and with social bookmarking, you want your title to be interesting, along with the description.

How Do You Detect NoFollow Tags?
Well for a while, this is what sucked so much. Detecting nofollow tags is what made things so tough. But now there's a solution. Check out the Search Status plugin for firefox. What it does is highlight all the nofollow tags on a page so that you don't have to waste your time trying to build backlinks on a page that isn't going to give you any.

Conclusion
Remember, building backlinks isn't as easy as it once was. The key is to focus on content and if you do decide to choose the route where you're only trying to build backlinks, be sure to use the search status add-on for firefox to check if the site your trying to use the backlink on is using nofollow tags. Good luck!

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