I read an interesting comment the other day on @steemitblog's recent post on how to improve SEO on Steem and Steemit.com. The comment from Steemit user @protegeaa stated that the links in your Steemit blog posts get a 'no follow' tag if their rewards are under $10.
He also remarked that due to the current Steem price drops, the 'follow' tag gets replaced by a 'no follow' tag when your post's rewards drop under $10. I had no idea that this was the case, so I'm glad that I accidentally came across this comment.
Why Should You Care?
If you're using Steemit to link to your own blog, those links will not have any value to search engines. The 'no follow' tag prevents search engine crawlers from following the link on your blog post, thus it doesn't improve your search engine ranking.
I personally also like to reward services that I review through my articles with a quality backlink. Since Steemit is so highly ranked, these backlinks do have a pretty big impact on your visibility in search engine results.
How to Check if Links Are 'No Follow'?
The easiest way to check whether a link has the 'no follow' attribute, is by right clicking it and selecting either 'inspect' (Chrome) or 'Inspect Element' (Firefox). You'll then see the HTML code for that link, together with the 'no follow' attribute if it's there.
There are also plugins for both Firefox and Chrome that draw boxes around all links with 'no follow' tags. Just search for 'NoFollow firefox' or 'NoFollow Chrome' on your preferred search engine.
Solution
The most obvious solution to this, is just to buy votes to get over that $10 threshold. If you're using Steemit to promote your own blog or other websites that you own, you would definitely want those valuable backlinks from Steemit. Whether it's ethical or not, I'll leave up for debate, but it's definitely an easy way to get rid of those 'no follow' tags.
Conclusion
I'm not really advocating for Steemit to remove the $10 threshold, they probably do have their reasons for limiting the amount of 'follow' links on their main website. This was just something I thought might be helpful for people using Steemit alongside their external personal blog.
Check out Mannabase if you want to receive a free basic income
Receive free Litecoins every 5 minutes
Get FREE basic income through Swiftdemand
Join STEEMFOLLOWER to gain more exposure on STEEMIT
The 4 links above are referral links and support this blog
