rel=nofollow : As if a slap is not enough

A note for Publishers – This article is written with extreme prejudice. You had your heyday but now you are irrelevant.

There are a lot of concepts and things which publishing houses and publishers do not understand. rel=nofollow is one of them. While publishing a guest post or submitting your article to any renowned name in the printing world or digital media houses try asking for a follow link. Chances are all hell will break loose and you might be shown the door. After all we are talking about giants like newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and media mughols. But just like their other wishful thoughts and ideas, this one too was all much crying about nothing.

What is rel=nofollow

rel=nofollow is a HTML tag inserted as a part of a code which informs Google that this link should not be followed. Lets understand this with the help of an example.

Likhavat Academy is a premier institute in Delhi NCR which conducts courses related to handwriting improvement and calligraphy. The academy website www.likhavat.com has been up since 2015 and has a good reputation with Google. In 2019, Nidhi Gupta and Aastha Kalra founded Business Mates Delhi. It is now the top business networking for women in Delhi NCR. The website for Business Mates Delhi was launched later that year to coincide with the launch of Chapter Two.

An article on the website of Likhavat Academy with a hyperlink to the website of Business Mates Delhi will signal to Google to up the reputation of the new kid on the block, Business Mates. This is the way Google works with links and ranks websites. Webmasters and Link builders have abused this provision to artificially raise the ranking of really crappy websites. This also created mass hysteria among publishers who decreed that a hyperlink will be discriminated.

What is more disheartening is that if an author submits an article with two links, one linking back to own profile and another to a high ranking website. Chances are that the publisher will add the nofollow tag to the lowly link. Being selective at its worst. Yes, nofollow is a tool which Google has given to webmasters to mark paid links and disown them. But it was never intended to be used in a discerning manner.

Useless mass hysteria surrounding nofollow

Publishers make the mistake of confusing between a link and a spammy link. All publishing houses and media websites have used link building themselves some time or the other and have paid SEO experts to do so. For the last few hundred years, readers worldwide hung on to the printed word. So with media corporations, it was either my way or the highway. Today the printed word being replaced by the digital screen, and internet technologies spawning a new genre of indie-publishers. Scores of authors and content creators are posting their own stuff on the internet and directly reaching out to their readers. This has cut off the middlemen, the small publishers. Platforms like Blogger by Google, WordPress and Amazon KDP have combined the role of author, editor and publisher rolled all in one. They have redefined the way a printing press was working for so long. It is time for publishers to accept this reality and the best foot forward is stop dictating terms to authors and content creators. A wise start point would be rel=nofollow.

Hyperlink policy of Narisakti

Every website has a clear hyperlink policy. In case of Narisakti, we deal with real people. Ordinary women who have done extraordinary efforts and become successful entrepreneurs. We do not use rel=nofollow as a sign of times to come where search results will focus on candid and actual references.