[Request] Secret Behind Do-Follow and No-Follow Links

[Praveen Kumar]

Hey Guys,

I am really frustrated with the 'Link Building' some kind of people saying "No-Follow Links never counted as a backlink so try for Do-Follow Links"
But i have saw that my site has lot of no-follow backlinks and it's counted in Yahoo Site Explorer so, if you can help What is really the secret behind the No-Follow links?

[dave_hermansen]

My advice would be to ignore it completely. We don't even worry about it!

1. Create solid, unique content that your visitors will love. This is truer now than ever since the Panda Update. I'm seeing sites with 20 good backlinks outrank sites with thousands of backlinks.

2. Slowly build highly relevant backlinks to your website. A lot of backlinks will happen naturally if you have good content anyway.

[IM Godfather]

Here's a question to ask yourself:

Wikipedia is probably in the top 5 of trusted sites by Google .. if you get a link from Wikipedia, which is tough in most cases, don't you think that would be pretty powerful in G's eyes?

Yes.

Wikipedia's external links are all no follow. Would it make any sense for Google to ignore highly trusted links?

Of course not.

Bottomline: ignore the whole nofollow/follow BS and work on finding quality links. Chances are some of the best links you'll get will be no follow.

[dave_hermansen]

Exactly. Well said!

[The Expert]

Take what you can, when you can.

As you search out places to get links (blog commenting or whatever) if you find yourself on a page that you know you can get a link from but you see that all the comment links are no-follow. Well...you're there already. Get the link. It can't hurt you.

The only exception to this is if you have to go through a lot to get a no-follow link. If I find myself on a page that I can get a no-follow link from, I won't pursue it if I have to sign up for an account and do an email confirm, then I won't bother.

I have a killer method for finding do-follow Power Links. If it takes a total of 4 minutes to do an account signup, email confirm, and then comment drop, I can build 15 links p/hour. These almost all come from places where the PAGES (not the root domain) is PR5 or PR6.

That being the case, I am not wasting 4 minutes for a no-follow comment. But if it's an auto-approve wordpress style comment, I'll drop something quick. If it's a super spam filled page, I'll get a link from there too...I keep a tab with a site of quotes open and just copy and paste it...so no time/effort even goes into dropping the comment. After all, if yours is one no-follow link out of 6,000 out of that page, you're really just doing it for link diversity anyway.

[InitialEffort]

For Google: Generally no-follow links don't count for passing page rank or for the SERPs. They will help other links and pages get crawled though.

[lovboa]

No-follow links DO help me. Most of the high PR authority sites are no-follow. However, I could feel effects it has on my SERPs.

[linksbuilder12]

The first thing which is obvious and is common to the dofollow links as well is that links bring you targeted traffic from other websites and visitors don't care whether the link is dofollow of nofollow. The second benefit, which I found to be rather interesting was that If we obtain just dofollow links to our website, the strategy won't look natural to google and the big G won't give us the reputation we deserve. So it is advisable to obtain a good number of nofollow links as well so that the link building looks natural to the big G and our website is given the credit which it deserves.

[IM Godfather]

Originally Posted by InitialEffort

For Google: Generally no-follow links don't count for passing page rank or for the SERPs. They will help other links and pages get crawled though.

Perhaps ... but Pagerank doesn't equal rankings either. Do you want page rank or do you want to actually rank for keywords? I'll take the rankings.

[MatthewGreen]

no follow is when a website decides to not pass any "link juice" to your site. They set there page to no follow for blog comments etc. There is no such thing as do follow but a follow link is a link which passes link juice to your site. I honestly wouldn't worry about these tags though. It is good to diversify your backlinks. You don't want to have all links follow to your site. It is good to mix things up. Every site needs pr0 for the foundation then build links with high pr.

[BenJackson]

Originally Posted by IM Godfather

Here's a question to ask yourself:

Wikipedia is probably in the top 5 of trusted sites by Google .. if you get a link from Wikipedia, which is tough in most cases, don't you think that would be pretty powerful in G's eyes?

Yes.

Wikipedia's external links are all no follow. Would it make any sense for Google to ignore highly trusted links?

Of course not.

Bottomline: ignore the whole nofollow/follow BS and work on finding quality links. Chances are some of the best links you'll get will be no follow.

I agree with your bottomline, but...

You say a Wikipedia link would be highly trusted. However, the purpose of the nofollow link attribute is so that websites don't have to vouch for the site on the other side of the link. In other words, it's a sign NOT to pass trust. Do you think that Google has hand selected Wikipedia and treats their nofollowed links differently?

I could possibly see nofollow links passing trust specifically from Wikipedia only because of the idea of Google choosing "seed" sites as proposed in the trust rank white papers.

[IM Godfather]

Originally Posted by BenJackson

Do you think that Google has hand selected Wikipedia and treats their nofollowed links differently?

Absolutely 100%. Google likes to have everyone believe that everything is automated and algorithmic, but that's just not the case. Google hand adjusts many many things. But even on an automatic side, it's not hard to say something like:

If a site has a PR over 4, a nofollow link is the same as a regular link.

I'm not talking out of my butt here .. it's been proven in tests that in almost all cases, for ranking power, nofollow and follow links prove no different. There are so many more factors. It's also important to remember that "nofollow" is a very old function and it's not something that is even really relevant in Google's ranking algorithm at this point, as the entire landscape has changed.

[lalitbansal004]

Originally Posted by IM Godfather

Here's a question to ask yourself:

Wikipedia is probably in the top 5 of trusted sites by Google .. if you get a link from Wikipedia, which is tough in most cases, don't you think that would be pretty powerful in G's eyes?

Yes.

Wikipedia's external links are all no follow. Would it make any sense for Google to ignore highly trusted links?

Of course not.

Bottomline: ignore the whole nofollow/follow BS and work on finding quality links. Chances are some of the best links you'll get will be no follow.

Many Thanks Sir.

[John Moore]

Search engines use the anchor in the link no matter the tag, follow or no follow, this way they can organize their library for relevant results, however, if you want to rank higher in their library for certain terms you need votes of authority, that is do follow links on pages with actual page rank, preferably higher than PR3.

[rajkanuri]

is it really worth to concentrate on backlinks or better to build content.. if you ask me I recommend to concentrate on solid content before actually building links, if you have solid content then the link building automatically reciprocates.. isn't it..

Regards
Raj K