PalatnikFactor.com

Nofollow’s Role in SEO

May 11, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik

There is a very interesting thread on SEO FORUM titled, “Nofollow’s role in SEO” When starting a link building campaign for a client or your own website, I think its fair to say not only are we looking to building links to get higher rankings in the SERPs, but always looking for quality links that can drive targeted traffic, EVEN if the link is NOFOLLOW.

The thread is interesting in its question about having a balanced link profile to the website. Does it matter if a website has all nofollow links? Is it shady if a website has ALL dofollow links? These are questions some….question.

One member raised a good point from an article on SEOmoz: Seomoz have their own crawlers for the linkscape tool (now I’m not being paid by Seomoz, though this is the second time I’ve mentioned them today on here)… they’ve just released some stats from it.

They claim to have crawled 475 billion links on the web, and of those they found:

“# 2.7% of all links on the web are nofollowed
# 73% of those are internal (so nofollow is actually far more popular as a link sculpting tool than a spam prevention device) ”

So only 0.729% of links to external sites on the web are nofollowed by their calculations.

So having no nofollow links in your backlink profile is unlikely to raise any flags.

Here are some responses from the thread:
—————————————————————————————–
“Diversity of your link profile is IMO an important part of ranking for competitive keywords.

Does anybody think this information is used in some shape or form?”

———————————————————————————–

“I think this is taking the diversity thing to far. There must be a ‘logic’ as to why Google would do something before putting forward a hypothesis that they are doing something. Google wants better search results. Google definition of better results is largely searchers find the data they want. This is the basis of why Google is winning the SE war.

To imply that lack of nofollow links means a site is manipulative and should have their rankings reduced IMO lacks any basis in logic. Google has told us nofollow simply is removed from the link equation in relation to juice transfer.

A powerful link profile does not necessarily imply a balanced linked profile. A profile that has a range of diversity does not imply what that diversity should be. A few very powerful links can give a powerful link profile. The idea that there is a range of ‘best case’ combinations of links does not appear to me to be a very good argument. There are way too many variables. The nature of the site/industry/market/competators etc all would change the range. On top of this the effort needed to calculate the range would be very big the benefit very small for Google. I think this type of idea only confuses and leads people to lose focus on their link building efforts. NoFollow links are useless for ranking purposes (with the exception they may have indirectly). Nofollow links can be useful for direct traffic.

I am a strong supporter of link diversity. But helpful diversity. ie diversity to increase ranges of relevances. Not diversity for the sake of it. Focus your efforts on those things that do make a difference and avoid getting distracted by those that do not….”
——————————————————————————————

Google’s role is to deliver the best results as you say. This includes removing spam from its index.

I think this point has been taken from a pure white hat’s perspective; suggesting that somebody who garners links in a natural way should be worried about nofollow diversity. This is obviously incorrect and not what I was getting at. I am also not implying that there is a best combination in terms of ranking.

But taking the case I mentioned, where a site is trying to manipulate the search, you can conjure up in your head exactly the link profile most would have because most ask the same questions of their linkbuilders.

Links in the thousands:

All without nofollow tag.
All on pages with PR.
All without true anchor text diversity (home equity loan, home equity uk loans, equity home loans, best equity home loans)

Taken along in conjunction with the other variations, I believe this is valuable information that could be used to fight spam. If not on an automated basis then perhaps using a flag.

Even if only 0.729%% of links are nofollow, if a site has 10000 links then you would expect some.

In my eyes, Google has become the best search engine, and the best advertising revolution since the TV because it uses every last nugget of information available; cookies, search history, targeted ads, bookmarks etc etc. It’s overarching objective for everything is to get information from you to.

For me, to say that they are not using this information because they tell us ‘nofollow simply is removed from the link equation in relation to juice transfer’ is without logic.’

The nofollow attribute is known mostly only by SEO’s correct, SEOs (WH,GH or BH) are the only people attempting to manipulate SERPs. Ergo nofollow is information that could be used to counter this.

I was trying to bring up discussion and am not saying this is true but there is IMO a logical basis for this to be used in conjunction with other signals.
—————————————————————————————–