Comments on: Long Live No Follow

By: R. Summerlin

R. Summerlin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:48:53 +0000

@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.

By: San Diego Website

San Diego Website — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:23:34 +0000

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

By: Owl

Owl — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:40:32 +0000

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

By: interactive

interactive — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:55:19 +0000

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.

By: Outsourcing Europe

Outsourcing Europe — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:23:50 +0000

I do use nofollow for my internal link structure. I find it very useful..

By: Web Design Worcester Ma

Web Design Worcester Ma — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:36:49 +0000

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.

By: Veyton Design

Veyton Design — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:15:58 +0000

we will see what happend after Google has change the nofollow strategie last month. I hope it will be helpfull against pagerank sculpting.

By: Chard

Chard — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:10:32 +0000

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.

By: Chris Arkwright

Chris Arkwright — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:15:13 +0000

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?

By: Dayton Web Design

Dayton Web Design — Sat, 09 May 2009 06:06:10 +0000

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.

By: Graphic Designers Resume

Graphic Designers Resume — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:30:47 +0000

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.

By: Oregon Web Design

Oregon Web Design — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:37:31 +0000

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.

By: pittfall

pittfall — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:46:01 +0000

@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.

By: alphawave

alphawave — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:24:10 +0000

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,

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:15:24 +0000

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.

By: Minneapolis Web Design

Minneapolis Web Design — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:41:18 +0000

Mark thanks for the tip regarding the firefox tool bar. I seriously dont know how I have not used it before

By: webcenter

webcenter — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:37:49 +0000

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.

By: Hosting Review

Hosting Review — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:45:51 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:30:34 +0000

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.

By: Jamp Mark

Jamp Mark — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:37:53 +0000

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.

By: pittfall

pittfall — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:51:59 +0000

@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.

By: California Web Designers

California Web Designers — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:48:01 +0000

@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.

By: botez

botez — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:47:34 +0000

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.

By: Web design UK

Web design UK — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:56:53 +0000

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.

By: Grand Rapids Web Design

Grand Rapids Web Design — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:21:16 +0000

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.