Blog Comments & nofollow to follow backlink ratio
-
Hello
I have a website with 2000 nofollow links backlinks and about 20 follow links. It is currently ranking 11<sup>th</sup> on Google. The websites that are outranking it have lower ranking stats and in some cases only 2 follow links.
Most of the nofollow links are blog comments, could this be what is dragging down my stats.
The only factor my website is worst on is the number of server requests per load, which is 194 as it is a theme.
Blog comments can be very difficult to remove; I created these several years ago before I knew too much about SEO. Most of them are on other websites in same niche.
Would I be best to ask website owners to delete my comments or restart on a new domain.
Thanks
Rob
-
Hi Rob,
The general rule of thumb is don't worry (too much) about no-follow links, although there are times to also ignore this as well.
Key factors that will be making a difference, are the content and the do-follow links. You can't just look at the back-links as the reason why you aren't ranking well.
Without seeing them, I would be tempted to just not worry about the no-followed links, and concentrate on:
- Making sure the do-follow links are of good quality and don't fall into the spammy category, and
- Look at your content and how good it is - does it match up to the competition?
It never hurts to do some competition analysis to see how your competitors are beating you.
-Andy
-
While Penguin changed a lot of things about links hurting you, nothing that I have seen anywhere has suggested that nofollowed links are harmful. Google gives these safe harbor, more or less. The only exception would be if you were spamming and get reported as such.
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
-
Question on Pagination - /blog/ vs /blog/?page=1
Question on Pagination Because we could have /blog/ or /blog/?page=1 as page one would this be the correct way to markup the difference between these two URL? The first page of a sequence could start with either one of these URLs. Clarity around what to do on this first page would be helpful. Example… Would this be the correct way to do this as these two URLs would have the exact content? Internal links would likely link to /blog/ so signal could be muddy. URL: https://www.somedomain.com/blog/
Technical SEO | | jorgensoncompanies
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.somedomain.com/blog/?page=1"> URL: https://www.somedomain.com/blog/?page=1
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.somedomain.com/blog/?page=1"> Google is now saying to just use the canonical to the correct paginated URL with page number. You can read that here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading But they do not clarify what to do on /blog/?page=1 vs /blog/ as they are the exact same thing. Thanks for your help.0 -
Duplicate blog - will it be ok to do so
Hello, One of our client is interested in creating a duplicate blog under a new URL. We told them about Google penalizing the new blog since it would have duplicate content. Will it be ok to go ahead with the plan ? Their response was there are multiple news sites that carry the same stories. So, they said that it won't matter. Cheers
Technical SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Spammy nofollow links
Hello, One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site. The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'. After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts. So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Does Google monitor which links are actually followed?
If a link to my site is posted on another site and many people start following that link and they stay on my site for a while, and I also have GA set up, does Google factor that information back into the Google rankings? In other words, are there ways that Google tries to use clicks and bounce rates and other user behavior to determine page rank and domain rank? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher1 -
Noindex,follow - linked pages not showing
We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow". Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator. Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be... Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15569050351140 -
Blog Setup
A client has been blogging for about a year on http://blog.abccompany.com/ and has a page authority of 37. With it's built up past history, should we change the blog to a subdirectory, http://www.abccompany.com/blog ? Obviously thinking what is the best long-term strategy / benefits. Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | evereffect0 -
Can hidden backlinks ever be ok?
Hi all, I'm very new to SEO and still learning a lot. Is it considered a black hat tactic to wrap a link in a DIV tag, with display set to none (hidden div), and what can the repercussions be? From what I've learnt so far, is that this is a very unethical thing to be doing, and that the site hosting these links can end up being removed from Google/Bing/etc indexes completely. Is this true? The site hosting these links is a group/parent site for a brand, and each hidden link points to one of the child sites (similar sites, but different companies in different areas). Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | gemcomp1230 -
A question about RSS feeds and nofollow's
With the nofollow tag used very widely on the internet these days I was just wondering about how an RSS feed might help me find a way around it. Basically my question is this : I post a comment on a blog, it's approved and my comment together with my link(nofollow tag applied) is there. Now when the blogs RSS feed updates, does this nofollow tag get applied to the feed? As far as I can tell it does not - but I'm not too clue'd up on how the feed is generated. Anyone want to help me understand how it works and if what I'm suggesting would be 'a way around the nofollow tag' ? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | DanHill0