In a recent post at SEOmoz, by Will Critchlow of Distilled, entitled Nofollow is Dying: The Impact of Micro-Blogging and Nofollow on SEO, is a review the overuse of the nofollow link attribute in online publishing by webmasters and 3rd party sites like WordPress.com, Blogger.com and Twitter and it’s impact on SEO for everyone. Before looking at what Will’s conclusion that nofollow is dying because of micro-blogging, let’s look at the purpose and reason Google, MSN/Live Search and Yahoo! adopted the nofollow in the first place.
So, why was the nofollow attribute adopted and used by search engines?
The whole point to instituting the nofollow relationship attribute to link tags was to address three main requests (according to Google Webmaster Support):
What are Google’s policies and some specific examples of nofollow usage?
Here are some cases in which you might want to consider using nofollow:
- Untrusted content: If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.
- Paid links: A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”). More information on Google’s stance on paid links.
- Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
Let’s take a further look at each of these:
Untrusted Content
The untrusted content, like the Twitter example in Will’s post, is that the 3rd party can’t reasonably verify all of the outbound links from posts/tweets/threads and many would argue that this would kill the medium that Twitter and others have become.
Paid Links
The paid links debate, we can look into further:
Paid links
Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.
Two important aspects stated in this that can be easily disregarded at face value:
- Google uses links to determine authority and/or reputation* (no where do they state that no followed links stop passing authority and/or reputation, just PageRank).
- When specifically speaking of selling links that do pass PageRank, they state the concern as a “disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact…” However, if I were purchasing a link, I would consider the source, just like building natural links. You would want to buy a link that is either sending a lot of traffic or gives high visibility or passing value (each of these can be a concern).
Crawl Prioritization
Crawl priority is related to internal linking efforts, so for the given scenario we will disregard.
Conclusion
We see that Google says that they will not find pages if the only way they are accessible is via no followed links, however, there are so many other ways to find this content and get it into their index. Even a website that has nothing other than nofollowed links has a registration through ICANN and can be navigated to as well. Google has made it clear that they want to organize the world’s information:
Company Overview
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
So, with this being said, it makes sense that they want to index all of it to organize. They want the data!
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
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.
Andy Beal would like to see another link attribute be created that would notify Google to follow but not pass value and Will Critchlow speculates that nofollowed links are/may lead Google to find and index new sites that they may not have found yet.
IMO, Google may not pass PageRank value through a no followed link, however, relevancy and authority value is still passed through any link from the page that links out.* I think that this makes sense even if the author or the platform places (by default or otherwise) the nofollow attribute on outbound links. Even if you feel that this attribute is a link condom contraceptive, that doesn’t mean that the link isn’t there, it sends users and why wouldn’t it send crawlers? As far as Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms, many of the links from these sources are passed through another 3rd party like bit.ly or TinyURL and adds another level of complexity to passing authority, relevancy and even PageRank.
If you don’t want any value to pass through an outbound link, try a couple of the following options:
- Don’t link to external sources (not recommended for usability)
- Link to an intermediary page that tells your user that they are leaving your site and block these pages from being indexed through the Robots.txt file (users probably won’t like this one either)
- Link out with the nofollow attribute for unverified sources and regular links that pass value to sources that you know anyway, keeping in mind that the only link (in my opinion) that can hurt you is the one you put on your site, so link to relevant pages (good for users and engines).
- Windows Live Search
- Review Me is Live!
- No Follow Tag Explained
- MSN Offers Another Great Tool – Live Search Box
- Wikipedia Goes to No Follow
What are your thoughts?
Do you think that the nofollow attribute should be disregarded by search engines?
Do you feel that the nofollow attribute is still a valuable tool for webmasters?
*The theory that Google passes authority and/or reputation through outbound links is not currently supported by empirical research or self-submission of Google.
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Personally I still nofollow the links on my web sites that go to pages I don’t want indexed. I still also use the meta tag with a noindex and follow so if a bot gets on that page it knows not to index it.
I also nofollow links to sites that I have not had time to read and make sure they are trustworthy. In the long run though I usually don’t end up nofollowing too many external links. If I feel it’s a fish site, I don’t link to it.
There are two sides to this discussion. One is with regards to internal linking on website pages, which is a personal matter for the website only and does not really concerns others. The second is with regards to out bound links, which concerns other websites as it is often argued thatno -follow links to not add any value or provide link juice to the respective out bound links or websites. This is one of the key issues in search engine optimisation. There are pros and cons to each approach. While no follow can be seen t o prevent comment spams, it can also be seen as a deterrent at times and can discourage participation in many cases.
After all how can a user know about a do folow or a no folow page. Is hard for him to realise so the blog’s owner will still be exposed to unrelative comments provided by unwelcome pearson.
@botez: the SEOBook.com toolbar has a button that will highlight all nofollow links on a page…I’m sure there are more out there, but this option is simple and let’s you know right away whether a site follows or not.
@CA Web Designers & @botez
Thanks for the comments and good call on the plugin or toolbar, your preference. Another is SearchStatus, which I leave on (SEO for Firefox I don’t because it can hit engines pretty hard). However, most users are not using anything that would indicate no followed links. The no follow element is for webmasters, one of the few things that really doesn’t consider the user and impacts SEO.
The quickest way to determine do-follow or no-follow is by browsing with Firefox with SearchStatus extension installed.
For me, nofollow is very handy when you chose to link to a page but without a vote.
All the pages I link to from my websites are do-follow. If I feel they are not trustworthy and should probably have it set to no-follow I just don’t link to them at all.
With the current situation, dofollow is a useful tool for those sites / blogs that really want comments, but overall I am not keen on the status quo except I think it’s good to nofollow pages on your own site like privacy policy because you wouldn’t really want them coming up higher than other pages in SERPS.
One point to consider is that even nofollow links do have a benefit, in terms of SEO.
Google may say that they dont pass PR or follow “nofollow” links, but if you just have a lot of links from high PR nofollow links, you will get spiders visiting your site often.
Mark thanks for the tip regarding the firefox tool bar. I seriously dont know how I have not used it before
As other have said, any link coming out of a blog of mine usually is do follow and I wouldn’t link to them in the first place if i didn’t trust them. The idea of nofollow is nice though as it allows for transparency to the fact that the link is not given consideration by search engines, but a person can still access the site. Blog owners who use nofollow are only trying to increase their own page rank without really deciding whether a page is trustworthy or not.
thanks for the articles.. i still didn’t understand about google mechanism, which is the best for my new blog.. no follow or do follow?
thanks,
@alphawave
If you are going to be very proactive in monitoring and maintaining your blog, I would suggest do follow, but you should include a plugin that allows you to manage comments. Thanks for the comment.
I used to use no follow links a lot, but now I’m just more selective of the sites that I link to. I agree with others that if a site isn’t trustworthy, it probably isn’t link worthy either.
Thanks for the article. Do follow links attribute helps to increase the traffic of the blogs, we can read the comments once before approve can be trustable.
I don’t use no follow links and mostly find them dishonest and unethical. Placing an outbound link to another site should only be done with care and consideration. If you don’t trust the site as a whole, don’t link to it.
Interesting article. I tend to think that the “nofollow” attribute was started with good intentions, but it has turned in to something that really hurts the web. The majority of websites and blogs adopting nofollow do so with the intention of hording PageRank, which may not necessarily be a bad thing, as it helps search engines return more relevant websites (for the most part), but it sucks for the people at the bottom of the totem pole.
If you read some of the articles posted by people behind the scenes, working on the search engine algorithms, like matt cutts and others, the PR value returned by SEO toolbars is not really the true or up-to-date measure of the PR. Only Google really knows the true PR (and they don’t post that).
Another good example is DMOZ (ODP). The majority links from DMOZ, even though they are “dofollow,” are on pages that are listed as a PR of N/A, meaning they have absolutely NO PR associated with them. So why then is it that people try to get listed in DMOZ if there is no PR benefit? Is there is some secret that Google is keeping. Most likely, yes.
Also, I really think that even though links may be tagged as “nofollow,” Google still crawls the link, but it just doesn’t assign a passing through of PR value.
What do you think?
Nofollow links have benefits too in SEO. I also believe about the issue if you don’t trust a particular site. Either nofollow or dofollow links, each has its pros and cons in the long run.
we will see what happend after Google has change the nofollow strategie last month. I hope it will be helpfull against pagerank sculpting.
I don’t mind hunting for resources that allows the bots to follow. It actually gives me a leg up on my competition as I’ve got alot of places to go to get backlinks for my sites or my customers. Agreed, link popularity still increases on a no follow link. My customers reap great ansillary benefits even from the no follows.
I do use nofollow for my internal link structure. I find it very useful..
hi,
superuseful post thnx. im thinking about how to do follow/nofollow programmaticaly so different pages would get follow or nofollow in meta tags (which would function the same as rel=nofollow in links. also i find FF SEO tool extremely useful.
I don’t find dofollow useful at all. It really “kills” small businesses that need a dofollow link to have at least a minor boost on the web and I don’t understand why even some small blogs have nofollow. They could monitor all the comments and dismiss the ones that they don’t like.
I agree with Matt: If you don’t trust a site – don’t link to it
I’m on the do-follow boat. As written in the article, if an external link is good enough for the webmaster to reference, it’s good enough for the search engine to index against.
In terms of user-generated content with backlinks, I think that it benefits the webmaster just as much as the backlinker. The former receives an original content boost to an already existing article without much work, other than simple moderation. In turn, the person who generates the content receives a little link juice in exchange. It’s a win-win setup, in my opinion, and keeps people coming back to both read and participate.
- Roy
@Matt – This sounds like the best course of action.
@Stephen – I realize this post is a year old, are there any new updates regarding the expansion or retraction in the no follow attribute? I thought I had read fairly recently that Google hasn’t been pleased with how no follow is being used, particularly with internal page sculpting.