There is now no reason to ever use nofollow!
This is a lesson in how fast something can change in SEO. For more than a year, link sculpting with nofollow has been completely ineffective. I cannot say that in practice it has ever been effective. At least my experience says that it has not been. I have never seen a major ranking change by implementing this theory. It may help a little, but I had already taken if off of my list of on page optimization tactics because I had seen no results from the practice.
In theory, when a link was nofollowed, it would not use any of the pagerank Google was passing around. By the way, I am not talking about the ridiculous page rank you may have in your browser that Google gives to us. I am referring to their actual pagerank algorithm. So, if you have 10 links, and each link is getting a point, when you nofollow 5 of the links, the other 5 should get double the points.
Matt Cutts recently let us know that Google no longer treats nofollow links in that manner. In essence, the pagerank or “link juice” is simply lost forever. Some folks used nofollow to make sure there pages never had more than 100 outbound links. Now, this practice is irrelevant, as the link juice is lost completely anyway.
I would not worry about having more than 100 outbound links on a page, especially a popular post with tons of comments. Just let people interact, I think a popular post will garnish enough inbound links that it will still pass good page rank to all of the links on the page.
At this point, there is no reason to nofollow outbound links in your comments section. Actually, I would not place nofollow on any link. Blue Hat SEO has a great post on diminishing link value and why outbound comment links do not hurt your blog.
I think that this new development is the beginning of the end of nofollow. Besides meeting Google’s TOS for purchased links, there is absolutely no benefit to using nofollow.
——————– EDIT ——————————-
As Atlanta SEO Sam Harry Pointed out to me, when siloing or theming a website, nofollow may come in handy. It gives you the ability to link across categories without compromising the integrity of your silo.
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I totally agree. I think we should abolish NoFollow!
Thank you. Bloggers should not really care about the PageRank and stuff like that. What they need to work on is provide good content to readers, just like what you did with this post. If you are writing great content, then people would visit your blog often, leave comments, bookmark your posts, tell other people about it, thus making your blog more popular than ever without you worrying about that nofollow stuff.
We should also remember that in the beginning, all links are dofollow, then Google introduced it. Glad to know this nofollow thing is on its way out.
I understand, when we try to wrote something we should think of the content, people will be visiting your website more often if the content you write is really appealing and something that the reader can enjoy reading.
Really the above post is very informative. Every time there’s no reason to use the do follow code in
your website/blog. Matt Cutts is a great personality of Google. He’s always right..
It’s still smart to use nofollow on things like blog comments so Google won’t hold you accountable for those links. You’re lucky I’m not linking this comment to some free-viagra-acai-poker.com site
Thanks for your viewpoint. Google does say in a post “Q: Should I put rel=”nofollow” on the link to my comments page?
A: Probably not, because lots of interesting discussion can happen there. Also, if other people link to your comments page, a spider can follow that link and find any spam that’s lurking on the comments page.”
This would lead me to believe that they are saying that a “nofollow” tag would prevent the spider from crawling the link.
I also agree that this tag has not and will not help any of the spam problems. I personally believe that both through captchas and moderation (both through software and then user review) is the best way to slow these spam techniques.
I have to read that blog where Matt Cutts said that Google no longer treats nofollow links in that manner. Using these plugging we can get better traffic.
What i know is that commenting on a nofollow blog will not help commentors to earn a backlink which in return will reduce your web traffic many people like to follow few blogs of their interest because of two reasons a) Its a topic of their interest and b) it will in return help them get some web traffic for there own blog or site. But again if the interest in genuine then only a follower returns to the nofollow blog. Its not about content anymore!
I also agree, we should abolish NoFollow!
I also agree, we should abolish NoFollow!
I have heard that Google does still follow nofollow links and that to some degree they do still help the site the link is for. Do you know if there is any validity in this?
Thanks for news…
Down with no follow…
It’s over-rated!
I’m not sure whethern we should abolish nofollow links at all. But it is so interesting to watch some web masters starting to fuss about these links. And what a hard job it may be.
Very intriguing read mate. I have always believed that nofollow links are worthless. But then again, after reading your post, my notion changed.
.-= Gerry@meth rehab centers´s last blog ..Save A Loved One With The Right Intervention Services =-.
I beg to differ. Most websites use nofollow so as to not to give a vote or vouch for a website in the eyes of the search engines.
.-= meth rehab center´s last blog ..Save A Loved One With The Right Intervention Services =-.
I agree!! No follow links are a waste of time. Everything should be do follow in my opinion. Thanks for the post!
The problem with everything being dofollow is that the quality of the SERPS are adversely affected. Ultimately, spam kings would own the top 10 of every first page of the Google SERP if all links were do-follow.
Google wants webmasters to carefully review each and every single outbount link before htey publish it as a do-follow, to ensure that the links that publish as do-follow are all of higher quality.
.-= adhocads´s last blog ..Do YOU know the difference between SEO and SEM? =-.
I disagree, Google is very good at discerning how spammy links are. Yahoo! seems to have forgotten about their search index, but when it was a major part of their business strategy, they ignored nofollow and still passed pagerank. My sites perform well there even though I am not a spammer.
I just don’t buy the idea that not using the nofollow on your comments, or any page for that matter, hurts you in the serps. Sounds rather silly to me. Also if you use a good filter like Akismet and do a little moderation, the spammers get stopped dead in their tracks. After a while they just stop coming.
.-= The Straight Dope Dad´s last blog ..The Girl’s Gotta Chew – Dealing With a Super Oral Kid =-.
It will be very interesting to see how this change affects the dofollow blogging community and the use of CommentLuv and KeywordLuv.
Now that there are so many dofollow blogs with KeywordLuv installed many of us are focusing our time and efforts in interacting almost exclusively with blogs that are both.
.-= Gail – Social Media Marketing´s last blog ..Are You Playing Hide and Seek With Your Market? =-.
Nofollow is unfriendly. I hope it goes away forever.
I pity on those who sculpted links with nofollow for all these years and now only their hardwork has ended in vain. I dont think using nofollow anymore for any reason is a great idea. Just type the text of the link and dont give a hyperlink thats it.. thats new age link sculpting i believe
.-= Alan@Tulsa Real Estate´s last blog ..Can You Hear Us Now Obama =-.
I usually practice the nofollow and dofollow but the truth is that the results are the same, I mean I’m not earning more page rank in my websites.
I don’t think that the “dofollow” help us to improve our rankings and also the “nofollow” are irrelevant.
Maybe I miss some pieces of the puzzle
I totally agree. NoFollow is a complete No No if you need good quality comments and feedback for your article. Cheers.
I also totally agree. We should abolish no follow blogs but majority of the blogs out there are only no follow.
I can absolutely see why nofollow is still used as it makes for a better user experience. However, it would be good to come up with a better solution.
I am so very very very confused about this follow business
I thought that the follow was the way to build back links
increase exposure and raise page rank – I am not sure what the discussion is about. Sorry for my thickness???
I think nofollow is very useful.
There has been a big change in SEO, linking strategies are getting more and more complicated than before. I really wonder how google sees links and how they rank sites nowadays. Actually having a great site with pleasing content is what webmasters are opting now.
Very amateur bloggers like me will find this post very helpful. Some of the common mistakes that we do which don’t result in the intended benefits from the work we do.