Don’t Worry About The “NoFollow” Update

Tue, Jul 7, 2009

Link Management, Newbies Starting Out, Search Engine Optimization, Website Promotion, Work From Home, make money blogging, seo-tips


This news has taken the Search Engine Optimization world by storm recently, but I say forget about it because that’s old news.

That’s right, this is not a new change at all in the way the nofollow attribute works, nor is it a new update from Google. Those changes were in place and effective since last year already.

So whatever effect this had on your site or not, depending on what you have been doing, the truth is that you have been living with it for about a year now.

So why all the buzz?

It’s simple once again people thought that they were smarter than Google, and once again they have been proven wrong.

The rel=”nofollow” is a link attribute that has been created by Matt Cutts back in 2005 with sole purpose to combat spam abuse on blogs. You know, when people comment just to get a backlinks, even more so when the comment in question is not really a comment…

One particularity of this attribute is the fact that it prevents link juice to flow through the link it’s attached to.

Some people started then to extrapolate on this theory and began using the rel=”nofollow” not to combat spam anymore, but rather to control the flow of their link juice, thus trying to prevent as many "leaks" as possible towards other sites.

Well, you know the saying, selfishness is never rewarded!

So, since the last year update of the rel=”nofollow” attribute, this one is no longer bouncing link juice for people to accumulate for themselves, but instead will absorb that link juice.

What does it mean?

This simply means that the link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute won’t get link juice from you, but also that you won’t get any more link juice either by nofollowing a link.

If you are using the rel=”nofollow” to prevent spam abuse on your site, then you probably haven’t see any difference at all, and won’t be affected in anyway by this change.

If you are using the rel=”nofollow” to control link juice, then you may get disappointed because it’s more likely to work against you than for you.

Now that said, most of you probably haven’t noticed that change either way, simply because for site sculpting (through methods similar to the use of rel=”nofollow”) to have any bit of effect on your site, this one should have at least 1,000 pages…

So if you haven’t yet published 1,000 posts on your blog, that’s just one more reason not to be alarmed. That being said, unless you have a mega site with 100,000 pages or more, there’s no benefit for you to do site sculpting.

In fact building more quality backlinks is way more effective to increase your PageRank and link juice volume than trying to do some sort of sculpting.

It’s like trying to build your online business empire on a dial up connection because it’s cheaper than ADSL; focusing on making more money will be much more rewarding than just trying to save a few bucks on your internet connection.

I already can hear what some or you are thinking:

“Should I remove the links on my comments?”

Sure enough, if you were to remove the links on your comments, you’ll be preventing some of your link juice to flow away, but again consider whether the trade is worth or not. I’m pretty sure that if you do that, the number of comments on your site will drop considerably.

Personally, readers are worth a lot more to me than a bit of link juice.

Lastly, I want to talk to you about a popular misconception:

“The more I will have links on my page, the more I will lose authority!”

Wrong! Your page authority level is defined by the incoming links, not the outgoing links, so regardless of whether you don’t have links on your page or if you have 100 of them, your page authority will remain the same. What will be affected however is the amount of authority this page can transmit onto other pages.

In Conclusion

This discussion about the change in the rel=”nofollow” is made much bigger than it really is. Don’t focus on saving link juice but rather acquiring more of it!

Just like in sport, the athlete should focus on victory and not on what if he can’t make it; likewise in business, we should focus your time and energy not on wondering what we would do if we fail, but rather putting all that time and energy to make sure we succeed.

See how huge is internet and how much link juice is out there waiting to visit your pages!

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This post was written by:

Nicolas Prudhon - who has written 8 posts on Work From Home Business Blog. Nicolas Prudhon, PhD is a professional SEO strategist, as well as published author.He's dedicated to provide SEO help to people through his site. Join his latest free SEO training course "21 Days SEO Mastery" now!

Contact the author

  • I love all blogs with SEO articles. Dofollow or nofollow is no matter for me. I always loved seo articles.
  • That's the spirit and the way I wish everybody was!

    Despite the fact that I'm working on SEO, I really like people to comment on a blog because they like it and the quality of its content rather than just seeking a backlink...
  • Hi Robert,

    1. No, the total amount of PR is not proportional to the number of pages in the domain that would be too easy, nonetheless, it's true that high PR sites usually have a lots of pages, but more often than not, pages of quality. My posts have higher PR than my homepage for instance.

    2. No again, the PR of a page is not reduced by the number of outgoing links it has. The PR is determined by the number of inbound links, not outbound links. However, the more outbound links a pages has, the less PR juice it gives to each link, but that doesn't reduce the PR of that page itself.

    Now, on a squeeze page or sales page, you try to have as little links as possible not for PR reason, but to prevent your visitors to feel tempted to visit those links, you want them to focus on your copy.

    So you don't need to go with a picture link, normal links go just fine.
  • robertseviour
    Thank you Nicolas.

    Supplementary question: would you agree that it is better to have a small number of backlinks from pages with high PR and few outgoing links rather than hundreds from pages with low PR and (probably) many outgoing links?

    Robert
  • Hi Robert,

    It's a bit tricky question because the number of outgoing links doesn't matter (as long as you are linking to a good neighborhood).

    Anyway, I would say that yes it's better to have a small number of backlinks from pages with high PR (provided they are cached frequently) than a lot from low PR.
  • robertseviour
    Nicolas,

    Do you offer SEO training, you seem to be an expert.

    Robert
  • Hi Robert,

    Yes, I have a free basic SEO training called the 21 Days SEO Mastery, and I'm launching an Advanced program next month, you can find out more about it on my site. http://www.nicolasprudhon.com
  • robertseviour
    Thanks Nicolas, I will check it out.

    Robert
  • robertseviour
    Hello Nicolas,

    Thank you for the rapid reply!

    <<the number of outgoing links doesn't matter (as long as you are linking to
    a good neighborhood).>>

    I think we have misunderstood each other here. I wasn't referring to how
    many outgoing links there are on my page. What I meant is; should we be
    aiming to get backlinks from high PR pages which have few outgoing links?

    Iin other words, if the donor site has a lot of outgoing links, is the
    authority which it can pass on reduced, compared to a page with only a few
    outgoing links?

    Also, is there any importance in the overall subject matter of the donor
    site, or is it solely the anchor text which matters?

    eg if I create a link to my site (which is about engineering books) from a
    page which is about cake-making (but somehow make my anchor text
    'engineering books') does that have less value than an otherwise identical
    link from a page of the same PR but having 'engineering' as its topic?

    Regards,

    Robert
  • Hi Robert,

    I see what you mean, sorry for the misunderstanding. ;)

    That's right, the more there is outbound links from a page, the less link juice each link will receive.

    Also, the relevancy of the site linking to you also does matter. You'll definitely get more value from a site in the same niche as you than from a different one.

    Just consider this in real life circumstances. Who would you trust more about SEO advice, a SEO professional or a cake maker? (Now that doesn't mean that the cake maker doesn't know more than the SEO professional, but logic goes towards the person in the niche).
  • robertseviour
    Hello Nicolas, thanks for your reply.

    Because the amount of work required to place links on sites which have
    relevant topics is much greater, I'd like to be absolutely sure that it is
    worth the effort.

    Do you have any test evidence which proves that a link from a donor site
    with relevant topic passes more authority than a similar link from a random
    topic site?

    Sorry to be persisting with this line of enquiry, but you know how much
    misinformation circulates in the world of SEO.

    Regards

    Robert

    ps I posted this message also on your blog because I don't know which you
    monitor most frequently.
  • Hi Robert,

    I understand your concern, and actually it's great that you seek accurate information.

    Now when we talk about niche relevancy, there are actually some confusion. The truth is that there are 16 different niches, and each one is attributed a specific PR value by Google, when you try to link between different niches, you are subject to a different lower value PR. This is confirmed by white paper regarding the patent associated the the PR algorithm.

    The 16 different niches are:
    • Art
    • Games
    • Kids and Teens
    • Reference
    • Shopping
    • World
    • Business
    • Health
    • News
    • Regional
    • Society
    • Computers
    • Home
    • Recreation
    • Science
    • Sports

    So actually different shopping sites even if selling different things are in the same niche.

    That being said, it only addresses the PR issue for Google, your visitors may feel turned off if your baby cloth store addresses links from a swiss watch selling store...
  • @Nicolas Prudhon: Nicholas, recently I spent some time doing lots of backlink building and focussed on high PR sites (PR6-PR9) linking to my homepage. The result was excellent. Now as most of them were of different niche, could you help to explain why I had such good results. I guess because these are very high PR sites, helped even though they were not relevant niche. Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.
  • Hi Peter,

    Well, when you talk about PR6 to PR9, even with lower value, there's still hell lot of link juice passing through.

    Even if a PR9 only valued at PR6-7 that's still bound to bring some value.

    Now, there are different algorithms regarding the link juice with purpose to increase your PR and the links with purpose to increase your Ranking.

    A link is still a link but one from the same niche will bring you much more value than the one from a different one.
  • robertseviour
    Nicolas,

    This is very interesting.

    I'd guess that my book site www.seviourbooks.com is in the 'business' niche,
    but possibly it is in 'science'.

    How can one find out in which niche Google has placed a given domain? It
    would be helpful to know.

    Regards,

    Robert
  • Hi Robert,

    This is where your linking network comes into play. By default Google doesn't know what a site is all about, it learns, based on the people who go to the site, and the links it gets too.

    One good way to see what Google thinks about your site is searching for it on Google Wonder Wheel:
    _ Courses
    _ Keywords
    _ 0xz
    _ Engineer

    This is also a good way to see if you are doing things right.
  • robertseviour
    Hello Nicolas, thanks for your reply.

    Because the amount of work required to place links on sites which have relevant topics is much greater, I'd like to be absolutely sure that it is worth the effort.

    Do you have any test evidence which proves that a link from a donor site with relevant topic passes more authority than a similar link from a random topic site?

    Sorry to be persisting with this line of enquiry, but you know how much misinformation circulates in the world of SEO.
  • robertseviour
    Hello Nicolas,

    Thank you for the rapid reply!

    <<the number of outgoing links doesn't matter (as long as you are linking to
    a good neighborhood).>>

    I think we have misunderstood each other here. I wasn't referring to how
    many outgoing links there are on my page. What I meant is; should we be
    aiming to get backlinks from high PR pages which have few outgoing links?

    Iin other words, if the donor site has a lot of outgoing links, is the
    authority which it can pass on reduced, compared to a page with only a few
    outgoing links?

    Also, is there any importance in the overall subject matter of the donor
    site, or is it solely the anchor text which matters?

    eg if I create a link to my site (which is about engineering books) from a
    page which is about cake-making (but somehow make my anchor text
    'engineering books') does that have less value than an otherwise identical
    link from a page of the same PR but having 'engineering' as its topic?

    Regards,

    Robert
  • robertseviour
    Hello Nicholas,

    I posted a question to the warriors forum and an interesting response pointed me to this thread. I wonder if you could give your opinion about my question:

    [ I read that:

    1. the total amount of PR that a domain has is proportional to the number of pages in the domain.
    2. The PR of a particular page is reduced by the number of outgoing links it has.

    So it seems to me that if you want the maximum PR on your sales page, then that page should have the minimum of outgoing links.

    I had a dozen or so outgoing links on my home page, but have now made a graphic, which pictures those links, and hyperlinked the graphic to another page which has working links within it.

    See the bottom of the page at http://www.seviourbooks ]

    Could you please tell me whether this is a good idea or not?
  • Thanks for nice and interesting article. Its very informative very nice idea about no follow link.
  • You're welcome. I'm not a big fan of the no follow links, but I can understand why some people use it heavily. Wherever you stand, I just want to make sure that you have all the proper information to make your decision to use nofollow or not.
  • It such nice strategy about no follow and described very well. I will follow it also.
  • It's just that people get overly focused about this matter while there are just so many more useful and rewarding things to do to improve your site in much faster ways.
  • are there any negative things about nofollow links? thanks.
  • Interesting article Nicolas. I've read so many conflicting views on the whole NoFollow saga. I've noticed that links from NoFollow blogs do seem to count towards SEO, or at least I see some of them are showing up in Google's webmaster tools. Whether they pass any page rank over is a different story...

    I do wonder if this has actually helped cut down SPAM as it was originally intended to do.
  • Ok, to clarify the nofollowed links, they don't count anything for SEO from Google. The nofollow attribute is created by Google and is not enforced by all the search engines, and not in the same way either. So it's not 100% efforts wasted.

    That said, the link that is nofollow doesn't pass any link juice.
  • Nicolas, thank you for explaining that as I was wondering the same thing. I heard that "nofollow" links could still be picked up, so now I know how that's possible.
  • The nofollow link can be picked up, just not by Google.
  • I've noticed a couple of links from definite "nofollow" sources showing in my Google webmaster tools control panel... would these have absolutely no SEO value at all?
  • If you talk about Google only, I would say yes those links absolutely have no SEO value, but that doesn't mean that those links can't be valued by other search engines.
  • Thanks Nicolas, point noted :)
  • This is a helpful informative post. Now, everybody will be enlighten with the issue on nofollow attribute. We should reward our commentators. But as commentators, we should also respect the blogs that we are commenting.
  • That's a nice point you made here. Reward and respect should go both ways!
  • we should focus your time and energy not on wondering what we would do if we fail, but rather putting all that time and energy to make sure we succeed.
  • Thanks Peter, I'm not even sure using the no-follow tag works at reducing spam either. I seem to get repeated comment spam on several blogs that are both no-follow and do-follow. It's like my sites have made it onto a list of some kind. I'll see three or four from the same IP on one blog and I know it's going to hit the others in a matter of minutes - identical comments. It must be a bot of some kind. It doesn't seem to take no-follow into consideration.
  • What I do when I see multiple spam comments from the same IP is go to my IP deny manager and block the IP. This prevents whoever or whatever from accessing my site. Plus, using this method frees up wasted bandwith and resources.
  • More often than not, anybody who spams on my site will get a free ticket to the IP blacklist.

    I really don't have time or mood to entertain those people, and like you said, they waste bandwidth and resources.
  • Yeah, I should probably start blacklisting all of them, but that would take a bit of time. The multiple comments from the same IP just stick out right away, so that's why I targeted them first.
  • I was using a WP plugin called Bad Behavior but I removed it when it thought I was a bad guy and locked me out of my own site. I was manually blocking IPs until the list got a mile long. It's hard to keep up.
  • Yikes! What were you doing that it thought you were being "bad?" Yes, it gets hard to keep up with all of them. The plugin sounds interesting, though. I'd be curious to try it as long as it doesn't lock me out as well. ;)
  • Yeah, I know what you mean. People who use automated software to blast the same (and usually stupid and irrelevant) comment on many blogs and posts. I get those too.

    What amaze me is that I found many of them (beside selling special enhancement products...) actually come from SEO companies or SEO people: I call them the traitors to the cause.
  • so thats how it works, does it only work on wordpress?
  • I guess you are referring to the plugin, it's a WordPress plugin, so yes, this one only works there. There may be others similar available on other platforms but I'm now sure about it.

    Just one more reason to blog on WordPress! :)
  • Yes, Some bloggers are trying to give link juice towards their blog by using no follow attribute and it can be useful too.
  • Actually the amount of link juice that you can actually control and the impact this will have on your site is extremely small and of little value so unless you have a huge site, you are pretty much wasting your time on it.
  • Yet another great and inspiring post
  • Thanks, I'm only telling things the way they are.
  • Hey Pete... How's your adsense going for you so far?
  • Hey ben pei, I wanna to know some things about "no follow link" advantage so please suggest me..
  • @ Make Money Blogging: It's kinda slow but I'm working on it.
  • @ Make Money At Home: Yes Lee I agree with you and that's why I always look forward to Nicolas' post here.

    I've seen some bloggers try to find a good balance in the giving and retaining of link juice on their blogs. They followed links to all commentators after a certain no. of comments like 9 comments.
  • Peter, yea. Nicolas really had very good piece of idea on SEO. Again, he has another great guest post over here.
    Perhaps the plugin is a great way to give and retain link juice on blogs, I may want to use in some of my blogs. :)

    Regards,
    Lee
  • It will not help to protect from the people using automated software, however it surely helps to discourage people looking around for dofollow blog to comment in order to get a quick backlink without offering any quality at all.
  • I do think that people who use automated comment software to leave comment will not be approved by the owner, unless the blog owner doesn't really approve comment and just let them live. It should be benefit people who really leave honor comment. I really hate people who leave a comment to say "Great post" and something like this..no point at all.

    Regards,
    Lee
  • Hi Peter,

    Always a pleasure to Guest post on site where people are responsive! :)

    I'm not sure the use of such plugin is really effective to retain link juice, however it's definitely excellent to prevent spam abuse.

    Here's a link where you can download it:

    http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/lucias-linky-l...
  • Oh? How to set that up? As in to give dofollow to a certain number of comments and above.
  • @Ben, I've heard about this thing before, I think it's something to do with the plugin.

    @Peter, any plugin for this features?

    Regards,
    Lee
  • @ Make Money At Home: Lee, look at my reply above.
  • Yes I got it Peter, it's Lucia's Linky Love plugin. I'm going to check it out and might want to install in my blog too. :)

    Are you planned to install in your blog too Peter?

    Regards,
    Lee
  • @ Make Money At Home: I like what it can do but the only thing that may stop me installing it is Disqus. Although I love it, it has not been compatible with a few other plugins like commentluv. But I'll see.
  • Oh really? I thought it can be working well with other plugins. I'll try to install in my blog later to see how's it going. Thanks again for sharing the plugin Peter! :)

    Regards,
    Lee
  • @ Make Money Blogging: Dofollows are added to comments only after the blog author has left a minimum number of comments, or trackbacks . This discourages scrapper sites from sending you spammy trackbacks but rewards real bloggers for linking to you.I believe there is a plugin called Lucia's Linky Love that does this but I've not tried it. Has anyone used this?
  • Nicolas, another great guest post from you in Peter's blog. Between, remember that we've discussed this issue in your blog? So, is this statement has been proven? Matt Cutt is the one who does these thing, but I think he himself is using the nofollow attribute for all his huge numbers of comment in his blog.

    With that said, we've no longer able to prevent the flow of our link juice. So what for we throw the link juice and not giving to our loyal readers who leave genuine comment? ;)

    Regards,
    Lee
  • Hi Lee,

    Thanks, and yes it's also related to what we discussed earlier on my blog. It seems indeed to be a proven fact, but like I just wrote, not something new, but something already in effect since last year.

    Matt will certainly tell you that he's using the nofollow to prevent spam abuse, though I did heard him advising to nofollow login page as acceptable...

    As to controlling link juice, there are other methods than using the nofollow.
  • Cool, any method that you recommend to control link juice Nicolas? I've no idea how if nofollow doesn't help in controlling the flow of link juice?

    Regards,
    Lee
  • Ha ha Lee,

    That would takes space and time like an entire post to talk about that, but to make it brief, just by deciding yourself what links you put where and pointing to which page on your site is also by itself a form a site sculpting.

    Just like having a link towards your prominent money page will benefit you more than a link towards a less converting page.

    Blogs have a tendency to have really a lot of links on page, but you'll see that many are very poor quality and of little benefit to you.
  • Haha, perhaps my question could let you to write another guest post post here.
    I think your statement here is to bring certain link juices to my profitable page, right? But when it comes to individual post, when it has tons of comments with outgoing links, the link juice might flowing out. But I think it's not a big deal for single post, it ties to the concept "Give And Take"..lol!

    Regards,
    Lee
  • That's right Lee, the success or failure of your site doesn't depends on whether or not you put backlinks in your comment section.
  • Absolutely. It believe that the success or failure will be related with branding of our blog, also trust from readers. Loyal readers will be people who makes our blog success.

    Regards,
    Lee
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