Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does the ratio of external nofollow links to external "do follow" links matter in terms of SERPs ranking?
-
My site has an external link nofollow:dofollow ratio of approximately 1:1
That is, there are about as many nofollow external links as "do follow" external links.
I have an impression that the ratio of no-follow to "do follow" links is a factor in the way that our website shows up in SERPs.
I have the impression from reading a variety of sources, and from looking at Seomoz, that calculate "trust" factors as if they mattered (in SERPs), that seem to value a relatively low nofollow:dofollow ratio.
Am I correct about that?
Thanks,
TimPS - I don't know whether or not this matters, but our website is at: www.trustworthycare.com - Tim
-
No problem,
I'm more than glad to help. Enjoy your weekend.
-
Interestingly, there's a strong correlation between the number of nofollowed links to a domain and higher rankings, although the correlation isn't as high as with the number of followed links to a domain.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-1
Most well ranking websites have a natural amount of nofollowed links, but I've never seen any evidence that a 50/50 ratio would either harm or benefit you.
Regardless, you want to keep working to build good, mostly followed links. If you continue to do this, you should be in good hands.
-
Joel - Thank you for taking time to respond to my question. I appreciate your help!
Is anyone else interested in offering their input?
Thanks,
Tim
-
There are no concrete rules when it comes to ratio of no follow / do follow but a rule of thumb is that you should have an 80/20 ratio of do follow versus no follow.
It would be suspicious if you only had do follow but wouldn't look right if you only had no follow.
As you already know, do follow links hold a lot of value. No follow links just gives the impression that your link building is natural.
That being said I would't remove the no follow links to get a better ratio. Just make sure your link building strategy focuses on natural white hat strategies
Hope this helps.
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
-
Nofollow links with high spam score
Hi All, Is it worth setting co-operation with website that has incoming links with spam score 96% despite the fact they're mostly nofollow? From my understanding there's still connection set between websites bit no negative impact on my SEO profile. Am I right? Thanks for all opinions.
Link Building | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
In Google search console all of sudden a lot of backlinks have disappear at "Link To Your Site"
Hi after update in Google search console yesterday a lot of backlinks in "Link To Your Site" have disappear, before we had 43x domains now we have 12x domains linking to the site. I have checked the sites where we had link do-follow before and they are OK. Can you please tell me the reason what has gone wrong. And also please guide me in fixing the issue , Hope to hear from you soon..! URL: https://www.finanstopp.no/
Link Building | | heleneolsen3 -
Nofollow affiliate links
I am setting up an affiliate program using software built in to my shop already (x-cart). The links generated by the software do not have the rel="nofollow" in them. I'm assuming they should have? When looking at Amazon, there must be millions of links out there pointing back to Amazon and all those links are followed back to them for link juice. Am I missing something? Surely best practice here is to re="nofollow" so you're not seen to be manipulating Google PageRank?
Link Building | | sparrowdog0 -
Drop in Rankings After Removing Links
So I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before? I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this? Thanks
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Footer Links And Link Juice
I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register /privacy /terms /search /sitemap /disclaimer /blog /register So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together? This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5
Link Building | | Ubique0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Does linking to a subdomain give link juice to the main domain?
I have a few domains that I'm going to use for link building, will the link juice from the sub domains transfer to the main domain?
Link Building | | Vsky0 -
Urls rewriting "how to" with .htaccess
hi, Please i would need advices (links, tips, tool:generator ?) regarding url rewriting through .htaccess (newbee about it). It's a "refurbishing" website case , the domain doesn't change. But the CMS does ! I've got a list of urls (800) with which i don't want to loose rankings on : Here the type of old url syntax : http://www.mydomain.com/home/newscontent.asp?id=1133 Here the new url type would be: http://www.mydomain.com/name-of-the-article
Link Building | | mozllo
or/and
http://www.mydomain.com/category/Page-2 Tks a lot...0