When it comes to search engine optimization, links have the most influence on one’s ranking in search engine results pages. However, not all links are made the same.
Links that come from a website that already has a lot of quality backlinks are given more weight than links that come from a relatively unknown website with zero/few backlinks.
Links are also weighted differently depending on whether they are “do follow links” or “no follow links.” No follow links were created as a prevention method for spam links. A no follow link tells search engines to not give the link any weight. Thus, no follow links cannot directly improve SEO.
The rules of content marketing are constantly evolving. For example, a couple years ago, some folks thought that they had stumbled upon an SEO secret—LinkedIn. Not only was LinkedIn a trusted authority in Google but the website links in the LinkedIn profiles could also be customized to create unique anchor text that was SEO-friendly. For this reason, they believed that LinkedIn could offer juicy backlinks to their sites.
However, times changed, and LinkedIn decided to get rid of the do follow links on the LinkedIn profiles and replace them with 302 redirects. In addition, most of the public links on LinkedIn are no follow links, which means that posting in discussion forums won’t do much in terms of helping you improve your ranking. Although you can no longer rely on LinkedIn for those highly coveted do follow links, LinkedIn is still a great way to expand your network and further establish your brand, two things that will help your content marketing in the long run.
