Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Are No Follow Links Worth Less..?

Posted by rohnsmith51 on 12/10/2009 at 5:36 AM ET 125 Points
I am little confused here.Google says it does not pass any value to no follow links but I have too many no follow links and my website still getting good rank.So what is truth..?
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  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 12/10/2009 at 9:28 AM Accepted
    Here's a recent article on how Google, Yahoo, and Ask treat nofollow links: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-google-yahoo-askcom-treat-the-no-fo...
  • Posted by excellira on 12/10/2009 at 10:39 AM Accepted
    Jay, that was a good article. I particularly liked the chart. Good find.

    Google however does not always provide the entire picture. The didn't state that they don't pass PR. They just stated that they don't follow the link. Two different issues.

    Google: "On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on."

    We launched a test site this year and only developed links organically through, predominantly, blog comments and forum threads that are no-followed. The site went to PR 3 in the first PR update with only ~35 backlinks. We don't see how the site could have achieved that result based upon the PR of the pages the naked backlinks are located on.

    I'm being a bit of a conspiracy theorist but from my observations of the sites that I've worked on and our test , I am not entirely certain that does not pass PR on all nofollowed links.

    The problem with SEO is that anytime you discover a pattern and establish a "rule", someone is always able to prove that the opposite is also true. Typically one approach works better in most cases than the other but it is an interesting phenomenon.

  • Posted by excellira on 12/10/2009 at 11:02 AM Member
    Please disregard my previous post. My system crashed while writing it and it wasn't comlete. Here is the full version:

    Jay, that was a good article. I particularly liked the chart. Good find.

    Google does not always provide the entire picture. They didn't state that they don't pass PR. They just stated that they don't follow the link. Two different issues.

    Google: "On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on."

    We launched a test site this year and only developed links organically through, predominantly, blog comments and forum threads that are no-followed. The site went to PR 3 in the first PR update with only ~35 backlinks. We don't see how the site could have achieved that result based upon the PR of the pages the naked backlinks are located on.

    The problem with SEO is that anytime you discover a pattern and establish a "rule", someone is always able to prove that the opposite is also true. Typically one approach works better in most cases than the other but it is an interesting phenomenon.To finally answer your question though, from my observations, I would not count on nofollow links to help you much from the perspective of passing PR or indexation on Google. However, I'm not entirely convinced that all nofollowed links do not pass PR.

    I read into the the commment above by Google that they could at some point theoretically eliminate nofollow from their process. Their ability to filter junk links is improving rapidly and that technological advancement may essentially eliminate the need for nofollow. FWIW.
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