Linking and non-linking root domains
-
Hi,
Is there any affect on SEO based on the ratio of linking root domains to non-linking root domains and if so what is the affect?
Thanks
-
Casey - Let me take a quick stab at your question.
I think that you are asking what affect a non-followed link vs. a followed link has on SEO rankings for a site?
If so, then the answer is that generally, nofollow links coming into your site don't help your SEO efforts. That said, the real answer is a little murky, and I'll take a stab at explaining it below:
According to Moz's Open Site Explorer, 2.97% of all links they found were nofollowed, out of 106 billion URLs and 150 million root domains. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
All of the links from Moz.com's QA section are no-followed, as an FYI.
Wikipedia's external links are no-followed as well… and this was done as a means to reduce abuse of the system and prevent people from using WikiPedia as one giant inbound link source.
According to the nofollow WikiPedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow… Nofollow links were originally suggested to stop comment spam in blogs, and in early 2005 Google's Matt Cutts and Blogger's Jason Shellen proposed the no-follow value to address the problem.
Generally speaking, no followed links don't help your site from an SEO perspective.
That said, Google has left it a bit open with their answer on how they handle no followed links:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=enHow does Google handle nofollowed links?
In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
Here's what Matt Cutts of Google says about nofollow links: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
"Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results."It's possible that no followed links can actually hurt you, if you have too many of them, and you're trying to use followed vs. no-follow links within an internal link structure of your site to "Page Rank Sculpt" pages in your site:
According to Wikipedia:
On June 15, 2009, Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer of Google, announced on his blog that GoogleBot will no longer treat nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent webmasters from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank of outgoing normal links as they started counting total links while calculating page rank. The new system divides page rank by total number of out going links irrespective of nofollow or follow links, but passes the page rank only through follow or normal links. Matt Cutts explains that if a page has 5 normal links and 5 nofollow out going links, the page rank will be divided by 10 links and one share is passed by 5 normal links.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/Back to Wikipedia, though…
Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but it does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).I hope this helps!
-- Jeff
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
-
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Sub Domain or New Domain?
Hi All, We have a client that has a business with three different services. 2 of these services compliment each other in a really obvious way, but the 3rd, while related is not such a obvious complimentary service. For this reason, service 3 kind of weakens the content of the website SEO wise for the two main services. Also, internally at the business it is run by an entirely different team so it feels culturally somewhat different. So, the client wants to pull all the content about service 3 and put it on a different website. Which would you chose as a domain for this new site: service3.existingdomain.co.uk or www.service3+brandname.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
Redirect gateway domain to main domain?
We have following scenario: Our main website - www.esedirect.co.uk which gets a 1800 visits a day with around half of those from organic search. It's been around since 2004. Our original website - www.ese.co.uk which gets around 30 visits a day and really is nothing more than a doorway page with links to the above site and couple of other sites that belong to the same company. This is an old domain that's had content since 1997 and has good domain authority with some good links. We are considering doing a 301 redirect from www.ese.co.co.uk to www.esedirect.co.uk to redirect the link juice. I welcome opinions to any possible negative effects this could give and how beneficial doing this will be. Thanks, Lee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ese0 -
Fading Text Links Look Like Spammy Hidden Links to a g-bot?
Ah, Hello Mozzers, it's been a while since I was here. Wanted to run something by you... I'm looking to incorporate some fading text using Javascript onto a site homepage using the method described here; http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades/ so, my question is; does anyone think that Google might see this text as a possible dark hat SEO anchor text manipulation (similar to hidden links)? The text will contain various links (4 or 5) that will cycle through one another, fading in and out, but to a bot the text may appear initially invisible, like so; style="display: none;"><a href="">Link Here</a> All links will be internal. My gut instinct is that I'm just being stupid here, but I wanted to stay on the side of caution with this one! Thanks for your time 🙂 http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
How should I handle these links?
I recently purchased a site which is in the same niche as my personal blog. MANY of the keywords which I want both sites to rank for, they are already ranking well for (Eg I rank #1 with one site and #5 for the other). I haven't started linking the two sites to each other yet (waiting to announce the acquisition before I do). I have 2 questions for you all... How powerful do you think linking between these sites could be? How do you think I should handle the linking between these two sites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroAndJobu0