Confusion with No Follow

[Micallef]

I've been finding that the opinion people hold on this issue usually depends upon their own ability to get backlinks from different sources.

For example, if scrapebox is all you know, then you have a huge incentive to believe that "no-followed" links in the name field of the content section of the most standardized and well known blogging platform on the net are very helpful for rankings.

Scrapebox is not all I know, so I have no incentive to believe that. Not all links are equal. If you can get better links, you will do better in the serps with less of them.

As for this bullshit about looking natural with nofollow links, it makes no sense whatsoever.

The debate is open regarding how much nofollow links help your serps - at least we can't close the door there fully - there is a chance that they pass a small serp benefit. Fair enough. I'm not really too fussed about debating that particular point. If my automated tools get them sometimes, fine.

But I can't resist stepping in when the "looking natural with nofollow" idea pops up.

Believe it or not, not everyone with a website is a comment spammer like you. Most normal websites dont amass nofollow wordpress name-field comment links by the thousand. They get a few solid mentions & links in the text of other trusted blogs - and these links (not nofollowed) are much, much harder for spammers to get. Google knows this.

In fact, the vast majority of all links on the internet are standard links - d0follow if you like to call them that. Nofollow is generally just seen in commenting, web 2.0 blogs and twitter/facebook style social media etc.

So many websites out there won't have any nofollow links. All this says to google is that their links probably came from non-user generated sources, and are therefore more trustworthy as votes. The idea that Google would penalize based on this, or view it as a flag, seems utterly counter-intuitive to me.

Besides, it's not like I could get a 100% d0follow backlink profile if I tried. Using automated tools, some nofollow links will always slip-in somewhere - which is fine, as they might send me some visitors.

 

[Micallef]

Remember when you flamed me in 2009 for saying twitter & facebook nofollow links work. It has been officially confirmed, just like i said, Nofollow links are counted.

Read it & weep;

Trololololololololololo

Hey Midget

If you look over my posts, I have long held that Google could very well make special exceptions for nofollow links, especially for wikipedia. In fact, I mentioned in a post on this thread that they probably count nofollow links from super-authority sources.

Still a long way away from proving that all nofollow links pass serp benefits!

 

[dragondani]

Well no-follow is less valuable that the others, but are usefull too, specially from autoriyy sites.
In fact when I have some problems to improve the ranks, I search for some nofollow links and then my ranks improve...perhaps Google watch in some way if all links are no no follow and understand that it's not "natural"

 

[Tensegrity]

The whole nofollow argument just stems from the fact people are living in 2002 when PR was the big thing.

All google mentions is PR when talking about nofollow. That doesn't mean anchor text isn't passed and domain authority and trust rank aren't even discussed on here.

I don't think google make an exceptions as that's not a scalable plan. What is more likely is that because wikipedia has such high domain authority and trust rank links from it still carry significant authority, anchor text and trust forward to where they link to. They won't carry PR, but who cares about PR.

hexalor, Micaleff and RightInTwo make perfect sense here (tho i might be biased cuz i'm a huge tool fan) and it's really great to see a mod chime in to set things straight, gives me more faith in this forum. but anyway, I've been selling my backlinks service for quite a while now and I run ranking reports on my customers all the time so it allows me to use them as case studies, and this is what I've found:

* there is nothing natural about a ton of links showing up suddenly for your site, no-follow or not. the only reason a ton of links pop up is because you're running an ad campaign or link building campaign..... neither of which will hurt you in any way. and in fact, you can easily get out of the sandbox by doing it.

* PR has little, if anything, to do with ranking

* most of your links are not going to show up as backlinks in google webmaster tools, but will still count. in fact, I've consistently seen links being followed by googlebot through pyramid schemes despite being no-follow and despite not even appearing to be indexed nor showing up as a backlink, but they MUST have been followed because the only way the site being linked to could have been indexed is if they were. as usual, G doesn't want anyone to know how they work, but they most definitely count all types of links, even links in flash and javascript depending on the situation. but for the record, a link is a link is a link, and you should live by it.

* anchor text is HUGE for rankings and we all know that. but again, this notion of looking "natural" by making some links say stuff like "click me" or using the URL for an anchor is just plain ignorant. i've seen brand new sites using a brand new domain and thousands of backlinks using only 1 anchor text (the keyword they're trying rank for obviously) totally work out for them. i've also seen the same scenario completely botched up when they start throwing backlinks to the site with no keyword in the title tag. it's completely bewildering, but people make that mistake all the time and once you get marked as a certain rank in the index it can take a few weeks to break out of it after you fix the title tag (but it can be done, it's not a fatal flaw or anything).

actually, most of the claims people seem to make in the SEO industry are just plain ignorant. people need to start doing their own case studies like any scientist would before relying on information that is pure hearsay and not based in any reality at all. SEO is not an intuition-based skill, it's a statistics-based skill.

I hope this helps, I don't mean to sound harsh, but seriously... people need to stop making wild claims.

 

[Johnnynumer]

Now i understand

 

[dannyhw]

All you need to know about no-follow is you shouldn't really waste time trying to get them. But it works the other way too. If your strategy is to do a huge scrapebox blast, there's no point in trying to filter out the no-follow sites. It's more effort to filter them than it is to just post to them along with the do-follow ones.

Now if you've got a strategy that will just get you no-follow links, just scrap that strategy. Not worth your time.

Now for the new BS that's going on because of the twitter and facebook links being counted, that doesn't have anything at all to do with no or do-follow. Google gets tweets right from a data feed, not from the tweets in their web page index. These are social links and they're not treated or weighted like web links at all. It's not proof at all of no-follow links being counted.

They don't pass PR, but there's also no reason to think they pass any real juice or count for anchor text. The whole point of implementing no-follow was to prevent non-editorial links from being counted, so what would be the point of only applying this to pagerank? It just doesn't make sense.

From personal experience, given any number of similar links that are do-follow and no-follow, the no-follow ones will have no measurable impact while the do-follow ones will have a great impact.

The only exception I've seen is that I've been indexed and ranked very fast from very, very high quality no-follow links. Like a few #1 or at least first page reddit listings. This could also be from other sites picking up the story on reddit and linking though so I don't know.

 

[dannyhw]

I forgot one more point. It doesn't look more "natural" to have a mix of no and do-follow links. No-follow is there to tell the engine that this isn't a natural editorial link. It usually signifies that you either paid for the link or were able to post it yourself. A site that is link building in a truly natural fashion would have few, if any no-follow links.

That doesn't mean it's going to work against you to have them, because that's just now how it works. The fact of the matter is the algorithm just doesn't take that ratio into account so don't worry about it.

 

[Tensegrity]

I forgot one more point. It doesn't look more "natural" to have a mix of no and do-follow links. No-follow is there to tell the engine that this isn't a natural editorial link. It usually signifies that you either paid for the link or were able to post it yourself. A site that is link building in a truly natural fashion would have few, if any no-follow links.

That doesn't mean it's going to work against you to have them, because that's just now how it works. The fact of the matter is the algorithm just doesn't take that ratio into account so don't worry about it.

i agree with most of what you say, but i dunno why you even talk about what is "natural" at all. the only case where i can think of something being considered "natural" is when someone makes a link out of a whole sentence or random part of a sentence as a dual emphasis/citation kinda deal.

and when you actually think about it, NOBODY's site naturally gets more than a couple links to the same page with the same anchor text just by coincidence. 99% of the time it's on purpose. so this whole discussion about what is natural is moot to begin with.

 

[dannyhw]

i agree with most of what you say, but i dunno why you even talk about what is "natural" at all. the only case where i can think of something being considered "natural" is when someone makes a link out of a whole sentence or random part of a sentence as a dual emphasis/citation kinda deal.

and when you actually think about it, NOBODY's site naturally gets more than a couple links to the same page with the same anchor text just by coincidence. 99% of the time it's on purpose. so this whole discussion about what is natural is moot to begin with.

I only mention that because lots of people around here claim that it's good to have a mix of no and do-follow links to appear natural. It's just nonsense, I don't know where that rumor started.

 

[Tensegrity]

Yea good point. Prolly just started with people being paranoid about their tampon blog getting slapped cuz they made their first 50 bucks. pull the string and grow a pair, i say