Nofollow's role in SEO

Diversity of your link profile is IMO an important part of ranking for competitive keywords.

Links acquired naturally will have a broad range of characteristics such as PR, age, duration of link, nofollow/bareback, tld, and anchor text.

SEO's tend to concentrate on getting a natural backlink profile with varied anchor text from different sources.

One thing that may not be included in this is the variation of nofollow and bareback (those w/o nofollow) links.

If you were to go through a naturally popular site's backlinks you would likely see a mix of the two. Go through a site that is trying to manipulate the SERPS and you won't normally see any nofollows (unless they choose to comment spam but thats not so popular anymore).

That for me is information that could be used by G to raise any flags. A site having 10000 bareback links without even one nofollow would certainly raise some questions.

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

Actually nofollow is actually much less common than you would think.

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.

The full article is at:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-building-an-index-of-the-www

SEOs know about nofollow (some of them at least)...

In other niches people have not heard of nofollow.

Build your links by writing the best content that you can, then the links will be natural, so you should get a natural backlink profile that way.

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….

A powerful linkage profile IMO can get away with a lot less mixed link diversity. But surely if you have a powerful and balanced footprint then things are going to get even better.

These are things that, if you're doing the right things, you shouldn't really have control over. And like Gaz says, focus on the things that are going to benefit you, like content to bait some backlinks.

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.

This is an interesting thought, Likely Google uses seed sites which a representative of an average profile of a relevant website. Then uses those as a control to base other sites against when determining ranks.

Do the seed sites contain a percentage of nofollowed links? Most likely, would not containing a set of nofollow links be a detriment to your site? Probably not in itself, but when applied to overall "profile" of your links it may play a factor, it adds to the deviation from the control. Logically this thought makes sense.

But take it further...

What we are missing here is that SEO is not bad in the eyes of Google.... Getting relevant links to great pages with useful industry information is not against Googles TOS.

Does getting a more efficient link profile mean that you are less relevant? NO. It actually has the potential to increase and help you, in a way that Google likes.

It still boils down to the quality of the link pointing at your page. Where do they come from? How long have they been there, how relevant is the page that the links are on? Is that page growing etc...

The low end links are either ignored or suppressed. Therefore the subset of nofollows (and pr 0, supressed/supplemental, out of date etc...) IMO dont really come into the ranking algo at all

Natural content-driven linkbuilders and SEOs are ideal for Google. The competition this creates provides users with greater content and in an ideal world it truly is a best man win situation.

But of course I am talking about SEOs who buy links in an attempt to represent themselves as a popular site. The question when it comes to defeating spam often comes back to 'How do you identify a paid link?'

The answer is usually not in the links as individuals but as a link profile. A popular site may have an SEO and that SEO will be contacting others with the aim of getting a valuable link (i.e. without nofollow). That's not to say that it won't have any nofollow links just because the SEO didn't actively seek that link.

Popular sites will have a natural profile in other ways because people naturally link to them. For every juicy, authoritative link one might get there will be others garnered incidentally.

Some industries will have never heard of nofollow, granted, and sites in those industries won't have any nofollow links. But because they aren't SE savvy enough to know what nofollow is their link profile is bound to be natural in other ways.

But a spam or low quality site whose method is to purchase links will most likely have a certain link profile. We have all seen countless emails from paid linkbuilders offering services and they are nearly all identical, which provides you with a distinct, unnatural profile.

Alone, it means nothing but start to put the jigsaw together and the coincidence of these characteristics occurring naturally flies in the face of probability.

I personally haven't seen many sites that use nofollow as a rule, except the blogs software (mainly wordpress) for the comments, wiki sites, social bookmarking, some content syndication sites and a few sites that follow the rules and put a nofollow on the advertising links. And the main reason why those sites implemented the nofollow was precisely to avoid spam

I am sorry it just makes no sense to me. Heaps of sites would never get nofollow links. Its more likley bad seos get heaps ie forum links, blog comments etc. SEOed sites will most likely have tried SBM etc It is just as likley (or possibly more) likely that a site with a lot of nofollow links is a Spammy site. The idea that someone who buys links is less likley to have nofollows then someone who does not buy links just seems to have no basis for that assumption. Google algo needs to be able to work across trillions of websites. Links that have value help links that have no value do not help... By all means chase nofllow links if you like but advising others that it may help in my view is simply bad advice. It just becomes another one of those arguments 'It does not hurt so do it because it may help'... Test it yourself add nofllows to a website and see if rankings increase. The idea that a site without nofollow links is more likley to be a spam site to me is just silly..

I agree with you in the sense that its not something I'm going to be advising anyone to worry about it or taking notice of it myself.

I appreciate where you're coming from as there may be users read a snippet of this discussion and go ahead and start to factor it into their plan.

I did think it was worth a mention though to try and see everybody else's thoughts. After all this is a discussion board, and discussion shouldn't be inhibited just in case someone decides to skim read and act on wrong information.

I agree Stevie discussion is good. That is the way we learn. My speculations on how google is treating the value of links are outlined here http://forums.seochat.com/link-popularity-43/linking-and-google-a-perspective-249762.html and I am also seeking others input on those views. Have a great day and thanks for the conversation ....

I'll be sure to check that out.

Thanks

You can get back links with NoFollow sites too! It still helps increase traffic.