Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain?

[Opera-Care]

Is there any significant benefit to creating online directory listings that only provide nofollow links to our domain?

For context, whilst doing link gap analysis I've found our competitors are listed on local government directories such as getsurrey.co.uk and miltonkeynes.co.uk. Whilst these aren't seen as spam directories, it's still highly unlikely we'll receive much traffic through them.

The links they provide to our domain have the nofollow tag. So I wonder whether there's any other benefit to investing the time in creating these listings?

Would be interested to hear your thoughts

Many thanks in advance

[Opera-Care]

Thanks for your input Daniel, much appreciated.

[Dalerio-Consulting]

The main takeaway for me would be not to focus too much on the NoFollow/DoFollow links ratio. If there are listings where you can put your site and you can get traffic and rank from, then just go ahead and add your site there. A site with (no-spam) nofollow links will always rank higher than a site with no links.

Having your site listed in those directories can in fact sometimes give you more credibility or even new leads, and if the directory has a high spam rating, you can always disavow the backlink.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

[Opera-Care]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for taking the time to respond, really appreciate your reply.

The SemRush case study is an interesting read.  My concern is that if we were to create listings with no follow links on all the directory sites that our competitors use, our nofollow link percentage would be much higher than 40%. In turn creating the unhealthy ratio of follow v nofollow which you mention.

If I can take away that the optimal % of nofollow links should be ideally between 20% - 40% then that gives us a good guideline of how many of these directory listings are a reasonable amount.

Thanks,

Will

[Dalerio-Consulting]

NoFollow links are normal and have been proven to be healthy when it comes to ranking on Google. In fact, if you have an unhealthy ratio of DoFollow vs NoFollow links to your site, it could raise red flags for SEO.

As the NoFollow attribute was introduced in 2005, the entire web slowly began to switch to NoFollow because of fear that they would be penalized by Google if their user-generated content was linking to spam sites. That entirely defeated the purpose of introducing NoFollow in the first place, and because of that Google has recently introduced and has been pushing the use of "sponsored" and "ugc" tags.

In a case study by SemRush, it was noted that for the #1 ranking pages on Google, around 20%-40% of their links were NoFollow. In fact, the percentage of NoFollow links for the #1 ranking page was higher than the percentage of NoFollow links for the entire site.

To sum it up, NoFollow links are good for your site and you should continue building links on quality sites, with a bit less regard to whether they are DoFollow or NoFollow.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com