No-Follow, Do-Follow, Can’t Follow?
*The following guest post is by Duncan*
After reading a couple of posts on this site and seeing just how worked up people are getting over the whole ‘no-follow’ link business. I thought I would chuck my thoughts into the mixer and try to clear up a few things.
A History
Firstly, the no-follow attribute (it’s not a tag) on links was first introduced back in 2005 by the Big G. They said that if you add rel=”nofollow” to your links then those links “won’t get any credit when we rank websites”. MSN and Yahoo! Quickly jumped onboard and said they would support the new initiative as well.
Even back then there was a level of mis-trust surrounding Google, and so webmasters and SEOs took it upon themselves to test this new ‘no-follow’ theory. Some found that the no-follow attribute did indeed work and sites did not get any power when linked to with no-follow links. Others have since claimed that power is still passed through no-follow links.
There was even speculation over whether Google actually crawled and indexed pages that had only been linked to using no-follow links. Unfortunately, there has never (to the best of knowledge) been extensive research conducted on this topic and certainly no categorical evidence on the matter published on highly-trustworthy sites. Instead, we have been left with much hearsay and speculation about whether no-follow actually works or not.
However, what we have got are indications and hints from the search engines that we can use to piece together some idea of the truth.
Common Sense
Firstly, we can use logic to determine what is in the best interests of the search engines. Spam is a massive problem for them and we know that websites sometimes need to link out to other sites that they don’t necessarily want to pass power to. For example, they might want to warn about a spammy or scammy website, but at the same time not help it rank. Also, many large websites cannot look after every link on the site and so are open to link spam. With this in mind it makes perfect sense for search engines to introduce a method for maintaining clean hyperlinks, but not ‘voting’ for the site being linked to. I’ll also add to this argument that in my experience I have never seen no-follow links pass any power that has gone on to help rankings.
Double-Bluff
There is another argument as well that comes about from Google shooting itself in the foot somewhat. By introducing the no-follow attribute, webmasters and SEOs soon realised that they could use these links to craft the internal power of their sites to make some of their pages more powerful than others (PageRank sculpting). Additionally, some sites starting adopting Black Hole SEO techniques, not linking out to any websites without using no-follow links, thus maintaining all link juice power in the site. The link juice does not leak out, but instead gets recycled internally and arguable increases exponentially, leading to very power websites.
Google obviously did not like the abusing of their very clever link attribute and so Matt Cutts wrote a post about how Google had changed the algorithm so no-follow internal links now wasted link juice. He claimed although no power was passed through them, no-follow links were still including in how many times the power of a page was divided between the links. Incidentally I don’t believe a word of this, but that doesn’t matter, what is more important is what it implied. This move cemented for me that fact that no-follow links do not pass power, otherwise Google would not have bothered telling website owners not to use it.
Crawl & Index?
In terms of whether search engines crawl and index pages that have nothing but no-follow links pointing to them, there are unfortunately not as many clues. However, it is my personally opinion that it does follow those links as Google very nosey and tends to want to know what is going on in every corner of the web. These pages rarely rank though as they have no power to move them up the SERPS. Again, from experience I have seen pages cached that having nothing but no-follow links. Even Google is not definitive on the matter saying “In general, we don’t follow them”, which obviously means that they can and do.
In semi-conclusion then: no-follow links do not pass power, but are crawled and sometimes indexed by Google. I cannot really speak for other the other search engines, but then I’m not sure I care about them.
Duncan is a search specialist who represents a luxury cruises company. Duncan often blogs about internet marking and SEO techniques of past, present and future.
30 Responses to “No-Follow, Do-Follow, Can’t Follow?”
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Aside from having your links crawled for backlink SEO benefits, many bloggers implement a Do-Follow atmosphere because it welcomes their reader to participate and leave comments. I’ve mentioned this topic on one of my previous posts, and I can tell you that it works well. It’s up to you if you want to delete certain comments that don’t add value to your post.
A no link is better than a nofollow link. I still wonder how Digg with thousands dofollow links (now it is nofollow) could get a high PR.
My assumption is it does not really matter when your site is authoritative. All these nofollows and dofollows are for smaller sites and people spend way too much time wasting on chasing dofollows.
You gave me a great detail about the nofollow and dofollow link. Actually, i’m not really care about the link attribute before this. If we really wish to promote our website, even the nofollow attribute link will also bring us traffic, but maybe no help at all for the ranking.
Fundamental to Google’s ranking efforts is the premise that it wants to provide value to its customers – the searchers. It seems to me there are 2 main ways a site can establish to Google that they provide value
- publish information (e.g. blog)
- co-ordinate information (e.g. directory)
Most sites can and do replicate that second strategy when they provide a list of sites they recommend using a links or resources page. Typically this has been the basis of a reciprocal link exchange process, but it can just also be used to list industry bodies, relevant government departments as easily as it can providers of complementary or even competing products.
It seems contradictory to me that a site could provide a link to an external site saying this is interesting or valuable to my visitors and then use a NoFollow attribute on the link to negate any implied recommendation of that site.
Google, via Matt Cutts, indicates the NoFollow now implies “Don’t Trust” and recommends we avoid rank sculpting within our own sites because of the contradictory signals it sends. Why don’t we trust our own privacy page?
I can understand the use of NoFollow for links associated with comments added by guests to a blog post. This is clearly a case where the webmaster cannot verify the link destination ahead of time. I think Google introduced the NoFollow attribute to cater for this situation.
Many times we make decisions based on the perceived PR that exists or might transfer between pages or between sites. We try to manage this and greedily attempt to limit the amount of value that might dissipate through an external link. Yet if we want Google to see our site as providing value as a co-ordinator of information then we may have to take a leap of faith and to share our page value with those we trust. If we don’t trust them why are we linking to them? Google’s recognition of our status as a co-ordinator of information should compensate for a PR exchange. Besides PR is only one of 200+ elements to Google’s overall ranking algorithm. Its importance in that algorithm can only be guessed.
My advice – focus on providing a clear signal to Google about the quality of your site and use NoFollow sparingly and appropriately.
Duncan Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Thanks for the added info Chris. Where do you stand on if no-follow links pass power or not though?
Chris Faber Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
I don’t believe any “power”, ie Google’s PR value, is passed on a NoFollow link. Despite that I am still happy to have NoFollow links point to my site. People still follow them and Google care where people go. After all lots of those people are Google customers and Google is always interested in giving value to their customers.
I cannot agree less, it’s a myth as far as I’m concerned. Having worked in the industry for 6 yeras now, I can tell you that nofollow links do have more pros than cons. Think about haveing 5,000 people visiting your page through a nofollow link. Rather thank ranking highly for a term with an average of 10000 search vol in a year. I guess it all depends on what you want from your link strategy.
i read your article, i known how use no follow and do follow.
I got link from nofollow blog till now i don’t really care about dofollow or nofollow i just like to leave a comment
http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php
really awesome idea. now, i know About No follow and do follow links?
thanks for the post.
I LOVE reading this
Fantastic blog Keep update thx for share good information seo
I just posted my blog on no follow. I think its important to link in relevant places, even if no follow and hope someone picks it up and links in a do follow page.
Surely Google must be still passing page rank through nofollow links? All wordpress blogs default to nofollow so if only wordpress users commented on each others blogs, those blogs would never be found in the SERPS, surely not?
Obviously Google is trying to improve it’s search engine all the time so by ignoring nofollow links it is ignoring the possibly of improving it’s own search engine by essentially ignoring some websites which Google users might of found useful. From a common sense point of view Google should still pass page rank on nofollow links but to a lesser degree. I also assume that Googlebot takes into account quite a few other factors to define how much page rank to pass with a nofollow link such as domain age, other external links and their quality etc. I’d appreciate your thoughts?
Thanks for article, I’ll just subscribe to the feed.
I was just looking at your source code, and it appears that your are using the nofollow tags in your links. So my question is this, if all blogs are doing nofolow now, how does someone get pagerank. Lets say you start a new domain caled “frahoo.com”, google has no external links to this new site, so the site has no pagerank. If I go add my linked comments and 10,000 blogs over the next 300 years, which is how much time it will take me to do this manually and none of them give me pagerank, how then can I compete with yahoo and get on the first page of search results if someone types in yahoo. I just did a google search for “yahoo” and atleast 3 of the first 10 pages were not yahoo.com, so how did those pages get pagerank in the first place.
So I am wondering if it nofollow makes any difference in PR or dose google just count the number of links to your site. If my site has 1 million no follow links to it, and another site has 500K shouldn’t my site theoretically be higher in the search results.
Also, how is the little guy who starts the new site supposed to compete. If twitter was just launched today, how would they go about geting pagerank, would the post to millions of blogs with nofollow links, or would they use some other meathod.
I need help people.
Thanks for this awesome post. I am novice making website. It helped me lot.
very funny thing.. your site is not dofollow
Every backlink counts. If you want PageRank go with Dofollow.
Do Facebook comments use do-follow or no-follow links?
You have a quite different idea,It sounds really amazing !
You have offered some really good advice for any newcomers to blogging who may need help with getting started with the basics link domain name and titles etc.
This article is very important for mim, obrigado por tudo.
Thanks for your post. Was searching for dofollow and nofollow articles. I understand if the site is blog that want others to leave comments, dofollow blog will attract more people to leave comments than nofollow. how about website that is non blogger? like shopping website that others can purchase online. Should we set as follow or nofollow?
Thank you for the post. Great information!
I’ve read that it’s good to have a mix of no follow and do follow links and to also mix sites with different page rank.
To be honest, I’m not really too concerned with the SEO value. I just like adding my point of view to interesting topics and if it benefits my site I consider it a bonus.
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