Case Study - Does NOFOLLOW Hurt?

Got 2 expired web20, NOFOLLOW.

UR 27, DR 73 RD 59, kind of "clean".
UR33, DR73, RD 111 (yeah, I know, that one was commentspam with EM anchor to death)


randomly (!) chosen one of my domains.

chosen most clicked page in last 30 days.

current, #27 for keyword.


Previous results
Position: 20 2016-12-16 00:00:38
Position: 21 2016-11-26 23:25:56
Position: 23 2016-11-14 23:15:08
Position: 23 2016-11-07 23:12:19
Position: 25 2016-10-31 23:11:17
Position: 30 2016-10-24 23:50:50
Position: 25 2016-10-17 23:50:26
Position: 23 2016-10-10 23:30:35
Position: 22 2016-10-08 13:06:01
Position: 22 2016-10-06 22:45:29

so it is kind of stable.


setup default content with exact match anchor, to target url site.

submitted site to google cache and gsa indexer.


sorry, for this test I dont have time to do the usual setup of 3 - 5 test candidates.

will report back in 2-4 weeks. else, I see ranking change

Useless case study, of course nofollow do not hurt for the sole reason that it's nofollow.

you kidding me ? You gonna test pointing 2 nofollow links ? You are wasting your time , if anything ever happens gonna be for something else .

Of course it won't hurt. The only thing with No-follow is they don't pass link juice. You still can get authority by these links. Example: Most Wikipedia links are no-follow, but still they are very helpful, because they give your domain lots of authority.

Even "bad links" wont hurt unless you have a bunch of them.

Nofollow links wont hurt.

nakamura said:

Of course it won't hurt. The only thing with No-follow is they don't pass link juice. You still can get authority by these links. Example: Most Wikipedia links are no-follow, but still they are very helpful, because they give your domain lots of authority.

Click to expand...

Actually, they don't, google have confirmed this multiple times. I have tested a few things with wikipedia links and they had no effect.

@OP I did a similar case study here on the effects of no follow links and their effects on indexing tiers above them, I doubt they will hurt your target site.

No, Google won't consider it as a link thats why it is marked as NO FOLLOW.. It will not hurt your website.

It hurt more to think that someone called pointing 2 no-follow links to their website a "case study", without ANY other data.
What is the percentage of no-follow to d0-follow?
Do those pages have d0-follow links already?
Was any other link building done to the sites? Perhaps some that hadn't been indexed yet?
Too many variables to even reach a conclusion, even if this resulted in ANYTHING.

Try this on some fresh, virgin, chess club playing, dungeon and dragons in their mom's basement domains.
Give them each similar content, same keyword, same density, same on-page factors.
Now drop in 100 links, of do or no follow, build some tiers(or whatever) and see if that helps...Then come back with a real case study.
Where did you even get the idea that no-follow links could/would hurt a site?

Yes I saw the link above, but the sales pitch presents a distortion of beliefs to the information presented...

I can tell you from personal experience, I have a site with 300 links, on 18 posts, ALL of them no-follow, just manually created blog comments. The site is fully indexed, the site is given authority in it's niche by google, the site now indexes quickly on all search engines and in a competitive niche(40+) is ranking in the 50s. No pain from Google. The no-follow aren't hurting me. I am of course now building d0-follow links to give the site a real boost, but wanted to give the site time to build slowly, as it is a LONG term authority site project.

hurt? it should have been "helped" in the title...

it is kind of funny that a misspelled title cause so many guys to wake up from keyboardjockey-world

Its shouldn't hurt

No, it will not hurt but it will just add as a backlink.
IMO add both do-follow and no-follow backlinks so that it can be natural to google

darulez said:

hurt? it should have been "helped" in the title...

it is kind of funny that a misspelled title cause so many guys to wake up from keyboardjockey-world

Click to expand...

Good.. if it's a typo continue then with the experiment.. I'd like to know too..

Of course, it does help. I mean there are legit marketplace sellers who provide Wikipedia links. Why on earth would someone buy them if they'd have no impact?

No follow links are still links, and they are registered in the google search console, so why would google give a fuck about them if they have no value?

No update in #.
stays around #20-23

I was always under the impression that you wanted a few no-follow links because it looks more natural. Maybe I'm wrong but that's what I've been told.

Bro. Honest ? Ok 2 of my 8-9 year old sites I got max 5% nofollow...
Those 2 sites all have NO link building whatsoever .. So much did the "look nTural crap"

I this test I only wanted to see if there would be any positive ranking changes ...

My gut feeling says ... There will be and this nofollow is just google and seoblogger crap that feed from their sponsored postings ...

I even did 3 contextual link pyramid - and that'd help. Though it took 3 months ... The cheapest fiverr shit - I just kept EMA to 5% ... And used many different 3 word anchors .... Like 50 or so
Just would not recommend that at all to point at any money site. Link rot it horrible


On topic.

Give it 3 more weeks. And I am sure the # will pop -10...

4 Weeks are over.
Hre are the results:

https://gyazo.com/b3173ccf8e03ec30745d9aa03c15f7ee

KW moved form #27>30

I will NOW create some relevant content, as for this case study, I just popped a anchor on those blogs and did not create relevant content around it.
will be fun to watch and examine

Stats of expired freeblogs:
UR30,DR73,RD106
UR25,DR73,RD53

I'm not completely sure, but this case study is complete waste of time. If you would do that with higher number of no-follow links then yes.

nofollow links are needed. how can they hurt?

U cant do 100% dofllow nor 100% nofollow.

However i believe more than 50% nofollow is needed for natural profile.