I keep reading about how link exchanges are terrible and can permanently damage your rank. This is true, you should know by now that there is no magic bullet for SEO. It takes good ol’ (relevant) hard work.

But many people are suggesting the treasure trove of social networks as a source of links. This comes with a major caveat, NOT ALL SOCIAL NETWORKS CREATE LINKS EQUALLY.

Twitter has been pressured (probably by Google) to attach ‘nofollow’ tags to outgoing links on tweets. What does this mean? It means you can post nonillion (yes, that’s a real number) links from as many Twitter accounts as you can marshall and it won’t count as a back link. Sorry.

The 'nofollow' tag, the link killer

Facebook does the same. In fact, Facebook has a function called UntrustedLink, which essentially is an anti-spamming tool. It adds the ‘nofollow’ tag so that search engines do not follow the link. This means no link credit.

What it can help you with is getting traffic through those tweets and hopefully those will get indexed by the search engines. So once again, build links by doing something remarkable. Then links will come to you, and of course you can always supplement that with traditional link building. But remember, if it’s too easy, you’ll get penalized, or no credit at the least.

Digg and Delicious are still search engine and link friendly, but it appears that Reddit is not. Any other updates on link friendliness? Comment below!