I've seen a lot of conflicting opinions around the forum lately, and I want to gauge your opinions on the following issues:

1) Page Rank - When you are building backlinks to your websites, are you concerned about the PR of the sites from which wou obtain your backlinks?

2) Nofollow - When you are building backlinks to your websites, are you concerned about whether the sites from which you obtain your backlinks use the nofollow tag on your links?

Completing the poll will help to quantify your opinions. For the poll, we can assume that all other factors are equal, i.e. relevance is not an issue because if you choose to apply relevance to the PR5 links, it is also applied to the PR0 links by default.

If you've got supporting evidence for your opinion on either of these issues, please post it.

1-yes PR matters
2- not really. am only concerned abt the link

1- yes of course
2- I am not building backlinks to my site.
Building backlinks??? If you have web site which is good then no need to build backlinks because backlinks comes naturally.

1. Yes, absolutely. higher is better.
2. Yes, if someone ask you to exchange link but he/she put nofollow tag in your link, remove the link from your website.
I agree with trafficsource about backlinks

100 PR5 ******** Backlinks
100 PR0 Nofollow Backlinks

You meant

100 PR5 Nofollow Backlinks
100 PR0 Dofollow Backlinks

didnt you ?

Originally Posted by insider

100 PR5 ******** Backlinks
100 PR0 Nofollow Backlinks

You meant

100 PR5 Nofollow Backlinks
100 PR0 Dofollow Backlinks

didnt you ?

Yeah I think it should have been the other way around. In which case I would take 100 PR0 do follows.

While nobody can agree whether nofollows do anything or not, most agree they dont pass pagerank so pr5 or pr0 it doesn't make a difference when it's nofollow

PR is a good indicator of autorithy, but it is not the holy grail.

i use PR as a benchmark for authority - not more, not less.
same opinion as crooker has -> get links from leader in SERPs for specific topic.

i don't care, if someone nofollows links pointing to my site i still get the clicks!

depends..another important factor is obl..an pr 1 page with 10 obl..is better than pr8 page with 200 obl..hope that helps

1. If you want your ranking, PR is nothing.
2. If you want to improve your PR. PR backlinks is god based on the number of offsite links it gives out.

Originally Posted by insider

100 PR5 ******** Backlinks
100 PR0 Nofollow Backlinks

You meant

100 PR5 Nofollow Backlinks
100 PR0 Dofollow Backlinks

didnt you ?

No, I meant what I said in the original post.

These 2 phrases have been popping up everywhere lately on this forum:

1) PR has no meaning when you're getting your backlinks

2) Nofollow helps you rank just as much as ********


All I'm doing is a test to see how many people really believe this.

If they do, then they will choose the "no difference" option

But PR5 Backlinks are always better then PR0 Backlinks. Because the Reasons for a high pagerank, is also a part of the Reasoins for a high linkpower.

Originally Posted by floppycode

But PR5 Backlinks are always better then PR0 Backlinks. Because the Reasons for a high pagerank, is also a part of the Reasoins for a high linkpower.

That seems obvious to me as-well.

However, all I read on the forum these days is "pr doesn't matter" and "nofollow doesn't matter".

I am just seeing the extent to which these ideas hold force.

Google is counting my "no follow" backlinks. They are showing up in my Google Webmaster tools.

I was using ScuttlePlus sites that were PR0 and "no follow" and those links showed up in Google. Awesome, isn't it?

Check out my other thread for more on that discussion.

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...backlinks.html

~The Internet Viking~

Okay... I really don't understand what's going on here... some one please correct me if I'm wrong.

This is one of the greatest forums available on the internet for any webmaster or affiliate. There literally hundreds of thousands of members, including some of the smartest and most successful internet marketers and talented computer programmers

The vast amount of knowledge and resources like TOOLS THAT AUTOMATICALLY BUILD LINKS FOR YOU is unbelievable


BUT WAIT!
Instead of actually SPLIT TESTING and performing the above 2 variations of link building to same or similar pages and see the effects it has.... we debate like little kids going back and forth "PR doesn't matter" "******** is bs" "PR is king" "i don't build any nofollow links"

Guys come on, I know there is a lot of theory and uncertainty regarding SEO... but there ARE numbers!!!! So maybe INSTEAD of some philosophical deductive logic based decision making (or POLLS) we should turn it a little bit more into a SCIENCE... you know with experiments and conclusions?

Sure enough 1 person can't run the test and give a dead right answer... but I think with so many webmasters on here we should be able to run similar tests and compare the results, which will definitely point in 1 way or another!

PS i love this forum and in no way ventilating or ranting any anger out, just a little constructive criticism u can hit the thanks if u agree

Originally Posted by g111k

Okay... I really don't understand what's going on here... some please correct me if I'm wrong.

This is one of the greatest forums available on the internet for any webmaster or affiliate. There literally hundreds of thousands of members, including some of the smartest and most successful internet marketers and talented computer programmers

The vast amount of knowledge and resources like TOOLS THAT AUTOMATICALLY BUILD LINKS FOR YOU is unbelievable


BUT WAIT!
Instead of actually SPLIT TESTING and performing the above 2 variations of link building to same or similar pages and see the effects it has.... we debate like little kids going back and forth "PR doesn't matter" "******** is bs" "PR is king" "i don't build any nofollow links"

Guys come on, I know there is a lot of theory and uncertainty regarding SEO... but there ARE numbers!!!! So maybe INSTEAD of some philosophical deductive logic based decision making (or POLLS) we should turn it a little bit more into a SCIENCE... you know with experiments and conclusions?

Sure enough 1 person can't run the test and give a dead right answer... but I think with so many webmasters on here we should be able to run similar tests and compare the results, which will definitely point in 1 way or another!

PS i love this forum and in no way ventilating or ranting any anger out, just a little constructive criticism u can hit the thanks if u agree

You don't need to talk to me about experiments.

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ox-effect.html

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ts-so-far.html

In the original post, I request supporting evidence for people's opinions. I'm gathering information for the benefit of myself and others.

I feel pretty sure that nofollow low PR links are no good for SERP increase. I don't want to conduct an experiment on that myself because my gut instinct tells me it would be a waste of my resources. I simply don't have the time.

Originally Posted by TheInternetViking

Google is counting my "no follow" backlinks. They are showing up in my Google Webmaster tools.

Google recognizes them, because they crawled the page the links exist on..

Ok i've got a PR7 domain and it's been PR7 for a couple of years. It's had a Nofollow to the contact page, and a Nofollow to a SourceForge page for years.

The contact page is not indexed, never has been and Google has never hit the page. The SourceForge page is not indexed, never has been either despite both having a PR7 link pointing at them.

So it's obviously passing nothing, nada and Google is not following the links (hence the name Nofollow) or awarding any merit to the links at all.

Try it, set up some valid tests.

Originally Posted by Micallef

You don't need to talk to me about experiments.

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ox-effect.html

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ts-so-far.html

In the original post, I request supporting evidence for people's opinions. I'm gathering information for the benefit of myself and others.

I feel pretty sure that nofollow low PR links are no good for SERP increase. I don't want to conduct an experiment on that myself because my gut instinct tells me it would be a waste of my resources. I simply don't have the time.

Micallef i'm sorry for the way my post appeared, i didn't mean to say anything against you regarding the experiments as I HAVE READ your other threads and a lot of your posts on linkwheels, and I personally find you to have the most informative / qualitative / quantitative / useful posts regarding seo.... perhaps that's the reason I brought it up for MORE people to get into this habit and have a lot more experiments to gather data from!

Both Of them provide backlinks but The Major difference in NoFollow and ******** is ******** helps to increase the Page Rank except NoFollow.

Originally Posted by Ontopic

PR is a good indicator of autorithy, but it is not the holy grail.

PR is the holy grail

Well. The thing is that it is obviously apparent that you dont need high PR to rank in the serps. Since you can search any keyword and its not as though the high PR pages are at the top and working our way to the bottom.

I think google does follow nofollow (weird saying that :P). Say i have a webpage with googles webmaster tools on it. If i go commenting on no follow blogs, but big ones like mashable or techcrunch. I see a massive spike in googles "crawl" stats. Definitely i always attribute this to the nofollow links i left. Whether google passed any weight or google indexed the page i dont know. But i definitely think google atleast follows the links.

An interesting experiement would be a train. So have a PR 7 page --> no follow link --> a random page with no other links --> do follow link --> a random page with no other links.

Would be interesting to see if the second random page gets indexed but not the first.

Originally Posted by Micallef

That seems obvious to me as-well.

However, all I read on the forum these days is "pr doesn't matter" and "nofollow doesn't matter".

I am just seeing the extent to which these ideas hold force.

think that just mean, that ******** and pagerank aren't everything. But its better to have them, as to have them not ^^

Right. So far, 88.64% of those who did the poll think that the issues of PR and NoFollow are important with regard to where you get your backlinks.

Thanks to everyone who has taken part.

Back from the dead....

Any more opinions on this issue?

My answer:

There are only two reasons I bother with nofollow links.

One is to get relevant traffic from related sites.

The other is to hide my tracks, not from the search engines per se, but from other link spammers. If you have an easy to follow trail, it will get followed, and your links will become rapidly degraded.

Page Rank of nofollow does not matter either, only relevance. They have absolutely no effect in the serps.

However some types of NF bookmarking, directories, rss services actually generate quite a few DF links on other sites, but they are usually temporary.


As far as d0follow links, PR is my first considedration, followed by number of outgoing links, and actually little consideration to relevance.

I have just seen this too many times with my own sites and split tests from similar pages, and also by monitoring and figuring out what works for my competitors.

It is easy to see this using backlink watch and seeing that time after time pages with a handful of high PR DF links outrank older sites with loads of NF backlinks.

I really have had success with just mixing a combination of do and no-follow backlinks of many PRs.

Relevancy of links is important to ??