Value of no-follow links
-
I'm curious to understand roughly how much % of value a no-follow link has in building authority relative to a do-follow link?
I understand that Google seems consistently and growingly focused on value - ie. is the link valuable in growing the business, irregardless of SEO - and perhaps therefore the no-follow / do-follow distinction is becoming a more unnecessary dichotomy.
How does Google look at do-follow vs no-follow links? And how much weight now is really given to one compared to the other?
-
I'll keep an eye on his site. Thanks!
-
I think that watching Google patent filings is an extremely important thing for an SEO to do. Google applies for lots of search-related patents and it is likely that much of what they apply for is never put into practice. If you want a single source to watch for Google patent information, explained in plain English by an experienced SEO, then Bill Slawski's site is where to watch for it....
-
Interesting—I guess Google doesn't completely keep things to itself, you just have to know where to look. Thanks for the information.
-
There is some indication that Google is able to count and may be starting to count "links that are used". They have filed patents that say that counting "links that are used" could be included in their algos. Information on patent filings that feature this can be found here.
-
In theory, a nofollow link should not transfer authority. However, I recently read an article by Christopher Cemper of LinkResearchTools that kind of argues otherwise. (He mainly talks about nofollow links passing negative signals.) I don't think it is possible to assign a number to this—it's one of those things Google likes to keep to itself.
In any case, relevant links from high-quality sites are a good thing, whether they are nofollow or not.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Sitewide links and owned site
Hi everyone, I need the community opinion on something. I am webmarketer and SEO for a pure player who runs a couple of e-commerce sites. On one side we have bigsite.com. It makes all our revenue. I have been in charge for years. Results are good. We have smallsite.com. It is starting. But small revenues for the moment. We have a new SEO working on this. My question is : We always had a banner on bigsite.com's homepage, sending valuable traffic to smallsite.com.T he new SEO, has footer sitewide links from smallsite.com to bigsite.com homepage. Considering both sites share same ssl, server and company name, I am quite sure this is out of google's guide lines and would hurt bigsite.com. Do you agree that this is wrong from the new SEO, and that it could hurt my work and the search results for bigsite.com and smallsite.com, as well as team work ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
How Do You Do Link Building??
I am starting to use the Moz pro tools like optimizing on page SEO for keywords and looking for opportunities. I know link building is a huge part for getting rankings on keywords in google search. Where do I start and how do I do the link building process for specific keywords I can rank for?? Thank you in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise1 -
To noindex and follow or noindex no follow?
We have to greatly scale back on one of our services and focus on the other more successful ones. I need to figure out what to do with all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back. Just to be clear, we aren't getting rid of the service. So they still want the pages on the website, but it is better for us to have more link juice going to the other service pages, more of our content ratio to be around the more profitable services, etc. So, should I no-index/no-follow all the pages relating to the service we are cutting back on? Or should I no-index/follow all the pages relating the service we are cutting back on? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Bad links
Well just set up SEO Moz to find out someone thought it funny to build a load of links to our site http://bluetea.com.au/ with the anchor txt "Buy Cocks" .... PLEASE PLEASE let me know how much I should worry about this and how can I get rid of it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intrested0 -
Domain Links or SubDomain Links, which is better?
Hi, I only now found out that www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ are different. Most of my external links are directed to www.domain.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
Which I understand is considered the subdomain and not the domain. Should I redirect? (and if so how?)
Should I post new links only to my domain?0 -
Blog links - follow or nofollow?
I need my memory refreshed here! Say, I've got a blog and some of the posts have links to recommended external sites and content. Should these be nofollowed? They're not paid links or anything like that, simply things relevant to the post.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Noindex,follow is a waste of link juice?
On my wordpress shopping cart plugin, I have three pages /account, /checkout and /terms on which I have added “noindex,follow” attribute. But I think I may be wasting link juice on these pages as they are not to be indexed anyway, so is there any point giving them any link juice? I can add “noindex,nofollow” on to the page itself. However, the actual text/anchor link to these pages on the site header will remain “follow” as I have no means of amending that right now. So this presents the following two scenarios – No juice flows from homepage to these 3 pages (GOOD) – This would be perfect then, as the pages themselves have nofollow attribute. Juice flows from homepage to these pages (BAD) - This may mean that the juice flows from homepage anchor text links to these 3 pages BUT then STOPS there as they have “nofollow” attribute on that page. This will be a bigger problem and if this is the case and I cant stop the juice from flowing in, then ill rather let it flow out to other pages. Hope you understand my question, any input is very much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck1