Can NoFollow Links Hurt You?
Updated on April 26, 2010. Please, see the new information at the end of the article.
I often get emails from Fast Blog Finder users who ask about the “NoFollow” blogs. Is it worth to comment on a blog if it’s "Nofollow"? Does it have any sense? Won't it hurt the website rankings?, etc. are the questions many of our users are concerned about.
Well, I decided to do a case study to see if "NoFollow" links count and if it's worth our efforts to post comments on "NoFollow" blogs.
But before I jump into the details of my case study, I'd like to share with you a good source where you can read about what a "NoFollow" tag is and why it's being practiced nowadays. So, if you are a newbie webmaster or blogger, go to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow to read about the "NoFollow" attribute.
And now let's go straight to the point.
I thought I’d run a case study and see if I could get my site to rank for keywords that are not on my site by:
1) posting comments on the "NoFollow" blogs only;
2) posting comments on the "DoFollow" blogs only.
For my experiment I chose the www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com website dedicated to Fast Directory Submitter, another link building tool from G-Lock Software. This is a semi-automated tool that allows submitting a website to free web directories with varying titles and descriptions. I had a nice experience with this tool, by the way. I used it to submit the same site www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com to 2000+ directories and after 4 months the website PageRank raised from 0 to 4.
I also thought about the keywords I would use as my name in comments and I chose a misspelling keyword phrase simply because 1) I was sure we didn't have inbound links with this anchor text, and 2) I’d be able to easily track the results that way.
To search for blogs, I used our Fast Blog Finder software. For every submitted comment I wrote a note just to know if the comment was approved or awaiting moderation. The program automatically inserted the comment date that allowed me easily track my comments. To ensure that I submit the comments to the right blogs ("NoFollow" first and then "DoFollow") I switched the "Highlight NoFollow Links" option to On. This way I can clearly see the type of the links in comments.
The term I used was free wesite sumission.
Before I started submitting the comments, I had searched for free wesite sumission on three major search engines – Google, MSN, and Yahoo – to see if we were already listed there by those keywords.
I found www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com at the 55th place in Google. MSN and Yahoo did not return our website for my search query.
Search engine results before submitting comments to "NoFollow" blogs
Click on the image to enlarge
Step I. Submitting comments to "NoFollow" blogs
A week later, on March 3, 2008 I went to the search engines and entered my keywords free wesite sumission to see the results.
I found www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com on the 55th place in Google (no change). Neither MSN nor Yahoo showed my site. Instead, in MSN and Yahoo I found the blogs where I had left comments. It means that the search engines indexed those blogs but my website did not show up in the search results.
Search engine results after submitting comments to "NoFollow" blogs
Click on the image to enlarge
What does this mean?
Comments from "NoFollow" blogs:
- DO NOT improve your website position in search engine results.
- DO NOT hurt your website position in search engine results.
Now you're probably wondering why spend time to submit comments to "NoFollow" blogs? The answer is simple – for human traffic. Always remember that you leave a comment for live persons. Thoughtful and interesting blog comments will always bring human visitors to your website who can then become your customers or subscribers. Has a search engine bot ever purchased anything from you?
It's also important to note that "NoFollow" doesn't mean a link is bad in some way. The "NoFollow" tag will simply cause Google, MSN and Yahoo to ignore the link, to pretend it doesn't exist. Still another benefit: you shouldn't worry that people will link to you and use "NoFollow" as a way to hurt you.
Step II. Submitting comments to "DoFollow" blogs
On March 3 I started submitting comments to "DoFollow" blogs using the same keywords – free wesite sumission – and the same website URL www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com.
By March 19 I got 13 approved comments on "DoFollow" blogs with the PageRank from 0 to 5.
The impact didn't take long to appear.
On March 4 (the next day after I started the submission to "DoFollow" blogs) my website was on the 1st position in Yahoo.
Two weeks later – on March 18th – I found my website on the 1st place in MSN.
And at last on March 19th www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com showed up on the 2nd place in Google results.
Search engine results after submitting comments to "DoFollow" blogs
Click on the image to enlarge
What this means is that comments on "DoFollow" blogs:
- DO help a website get a higher position in search engines results.
- DO help get more human traffic and sales because having found your website on top positions people will likely click on your link.
Unlike the links from "NoFollow" blogs that are completely ignored by Google, MSN and Yahoo, a link from a comment on a "DoFollow" blog is counted as a backlink. More quality backlinks a website has, higher its position in search engines.
Now let me just quickly recap what I concluded from my own experience…
- Comments on "NoFollow" blogs neither help nor hurt a website ranking in search engines but still they can bring some human traffic. "NoFollow" links do not affect a website search engine position.
- Comments on "DoFollow" blogs do help a website get top positions in search engines for target keywords => you get more website traffic and sales. Links from "DoFollow" blogs are counted as the "votes" for a website ranking.
One more important point: on my opinion, you should tend to natural blog linking that means commenting on "DoFollow" blogs as well as on "NoFollow" blogs with higher PR. If you submit comments to "DoFollow" blogs only, your link building strategy is not following natural ways, and could be considered as anchor text and linking manipulation.
Also be selective with the anchor text. Along with your keywords you can use your name or nickname to show that you comment because you have something to say and not because you want to solicit a backlink. You can limit your non-relevant anchors to 15% of your comments and use them on low authority blogs. On big sites, go for the big prize and enter your targeted keyword anchor text.
And that's not all… As my case study shows blog commenting can help you get your website to rank well for misspelled keywords. People are often in a hurry and can type the keywords with mistakes. So, what do they get in the results? There is a great chance for your URL to be on the 1st position and a great opportunity for you to get new customers.
As you see, blog commenting is one of the most effective and easiest link building strategies along with article submission and directory submission. Applying the combination of these tools you can get an outstanding result in your website promotion.
Read how the Gold version of Fast Blog Finder differs from the Free version and start searching for "DoFollow" blogs right now.
April 26, 2010 update…
Well, it has been more than 2 years since I made this case study.
Today I'm curious if my site www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com is still on the top positions in search engines for my test keywords "free wesite sumission".
I did a search and here is what I found. Please, see the screenshots below.
www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com is on the 1st place in all search engines used for the case study – Google, Yahoo and Bing (former MSN).
Click on the image to enlarge it
I often hear people saying on forums that links from blog comments are no longer valued by search engines so we should not waste our time for blog commenting.
But as you can see yourself our website still takes the top position in search engines after 2 years. So, we can conclude that DoFollow links from blog comments are still valued and contribute to the website ranking.
I chose the misspelled phrase "free wesite sumission" for my case study to be able to easily search for it at a later time because we don't have competitors for this phrase. Note that I did not use any other link building methods except blog commenting to build links for "free wesite sumission" keywords during and after the case study. So, the links obtained from comments during the case study were the only ones counted by search engines.
Of course, if you want to rank for popular keywords, you need to build links continuously and use various link building methods such as blog commenting, directory submission, press releases etc.
BTW. Are you still using the free version of Fast Blog Finder? Learn what the Gold version can do for you here.
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Comments (87)
Well my research on nofollow is little different. I took a site whose domain was new and the site was also fresh with not much pages indexed in google. I did some optimization on the site and then used your software to find blog post related to the topic of the site and as far as I remember, 99.9% blogs were nofollow. I found a great increase the number of hits from search engine and I was able to beat 3 compettors also which even had a good page rank!!
An interesting piece of research. I have had blogs that i run appear on search engines alongside the actual website they are promoting. Like you say they help human traffic and also occupy another space in the SERPS – meaning your competitors aren’t there!
Sometimes it is enough just a couple of links from “DoFollow” blogs to appear at the top of the search engine results, in particular if there are no competitors listed for your keywords. What I wanted to show by my case study is that after submitting comments to “NoFollow” blogs my website did not show in the search engines for the keywords I chose (and it wasn’t there before). So, it means that the search engines ignore “NoFollow” links. Yahoo and MSN may follow those links but don’t count them as backlinks to a website. Google seems to completely pretend that such links don’t exist.
I actually asked this very same question in one of your other articles and this was the answer I was looking for.
Basically your results are actually quite predictable and confirms that “nofollow” does what it’s supposed to do; now while Mohd. Hashim Khan’s results differ, perhaps that is more of a human traffic increase and I would assume the increase in search engine traffic was due to some other kind of optimization he did.
A very good study. One item which could be a variable is the number of inbound links to a particular post and how that might impact both the chances of the post link being picked up and the amount of human traffic that was generated. Does anyone think this should be explored?
Also, I am under the impression that the nofollow is something that does not allow PR to pass to the other site. Therefore, the link is still valid and might have some benefit down the road for the poster. The aspect of the inbound links to the blog post could have an impact in this regard.
Hello,
This is a very hot topic right now because it seems that a lot of people have an opinion which is often based on limited research.
Thanks for taking the time to flesh out some real numbers to prove your theory.
I want to make sure to mention that people should also follow Jonathan Leger’s 4 prong link building approach detailed on his blog.
Thanks,
Jeff
Thanks for sharing your results with us Julia,
I must admit that more often than not I will check to see if the blog is using the “nofollow” tag and if they are I am less likely to comment, sometimes I do because as you say, you can get traffic from human reading the comments, in thse cases I’m not looking for the backlink but its another way to get some “free advertising”
Lee
Reading about nofollow (a term unknown to me until today), makes me dizzy. Perhaps spending hours researching what search engines do makes sense and sends traffic to my site. On the other hand, most of us do not have the time or expertise to apply nofollow tactics. Makes me wonder if this is to our detriment, or if the creative is more important than the competitive in website marketing. I do acknowledge the need to know these functions; just not able to apply them. This begs the question, “Are these tools/tactics essential to Internet success?”
Very interesting article. Seeing the nofollow do nothing and the dofollow get you what you are looking for seems to be reasonable. I still don’t get why the nofollow is used so much more than the other. So you pass some juice, you are also getting free content, that should be worth something. Plus you can moderate the post, so only the good content is left on the site. Still has me wondering?
Steve
Its good to see some solid research on the subject on ‘no follow’ and ‘do follow’. There are too many sites in the Internet Marketing world stating a position on these tags without any real facts.
Julia, thanks for sharing your findings. As you mention near the bottom of your post, this can be a very quick way to help boost your rankings for misspelled keywords.
I think this deserves to be emphasized. When someone is pounding their head against the wall trying to rank well for competitive keywords with lots of competition, spending a few weeks posting with a variety of common misspellings can boost your traffic more than what the same effort would yield if using the main keywords.
I agree with you, I also have done some research and I found by posting in a single follow blog, the very next day the above term increased 130 positions in google. ( yes from one posting, believe it or not). If has been known for a long time that posting in No Follow blogs is a waist of time for SEO. Yes no follow blogs may bring you some traffic but nothing compaired to ranking high in the search engines. However, you do need some post in both blogs and forums. The search engines are getting smarter all the time. They will know if your spamming your post, so do not bother.
Hi
I have always ignored blog’s with “no follow” thinking it a waste of time. After reading you post I think I’ll sow a few “no Follow seeds and see what happens Couldn’t hurt and might give credence to the other posts.
Thanks
Terry
Thanks for saving me the time to research this. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself. Your results confirmed my theory.
Per Ray Randall’s comments: Nearly everything that can be accomplished via commenting, backlinking and articles will ultimately happen on its own. Knowing and utilizing these techniques simply shortens the process of building your site’s family tree. Without these techniques, it can literally take YEARS to accomplish what you can now do in months. Unless you have a brand that causes people to simply type in your web address, waiting for it to occur naturally can be excruciating.
Man this is good information I have always gone after the dofollow links as even with fast blog finder occassionally the blogs are nofollow and I have been spending time making sure that they are dofollow. I guess I just need to make a comment anyway on them. That would give me some variety. I have never tested how quick the links were indexed and my rankings on google for the keyword after the post.
Thanks
butch
This is very interesting. I had always heard that Yahoo and MSN bots don’t even recognize the “no follow” command and that Google was the only search engine this applied to. Thanks for the insight!
Hello,
>Man this is good information I have always gone after the dofollow links as even with fast blog finder occasionally the blogs are nofollow and I have been spending time making sure that they are dofollow
Now you can switch the “Highlight NoFollow Links” option in the Fast Blog Finder to On and all “NoFollow” links will be highlighted. This way you can ensure that the link type is determined properly.
Hi Julia,
Cool mini-study!
I especially like the concept of “human visitors” as trafic generators:-) It is a totally overseen parameter in these SEO-days. Cool content, nice functionality and interaction with users as a platform gives me a really good gut-feeling my self.
/Claus
Thank-you Julia
I just signed up for fastblogfinder last night and although I am just beginning to use it, I think it is a very good tool. I also enjoyed your dofollow and nofollow article and found it very informative.
If you have a few minutes please visit my sports blog and leave a comment. I would value your input and since being a blogger newbie any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely Walt Webb
P.S Would you have a fastblogfinder link that I could put on my blogroll, as I would like to recommend your service
Interesting post. I did read elsewhere that google ignores nofollow, yahoo will spider through it for indexing purposes but won’t count it towards link popularity, but ask.com said that they don’t subscribe to google’s nofollow attribute at all and consider all links…
I have to assume that as the engines get smarter, if they see posts that are only from dofollows they will be able to identify the pattern and filter the sites out because they are artificially building link popularity. Like most things on the web, good content in site creation, a post etc. is good for the reader and will generate benefits. Readership, branding and on a good day links. I would not stop posting to a blog just because it does not pass PR, however I do make those that do a higher priority.
Julia, that is a great study. I am venturing that nofollow blogs get less comments, so you have a higher chance of having real people click over (less competition).
Also I think google probably detects that a site is (a) blog (b) forum (c) directory, … so when it sees a lot of dofollow links and all from blogs, it goes hmmm…. So mixing your comments is a good idea and I would definitely mix it up beyond blogs as well. Also mixing anchor text was another great idea. Do put “click her” as the anchor too, since statistically that phrase should occur a good pct of time.
Hey Julia,
I was wondering… can you show us an example of how you made your actual post in the comments section on the blogs?
Are you just putting the keyword you want to link to in the “NAME” feed or putting the mistyped text in the comment section with http://website.com next to the URL?
I’d be nice to get a screen shot of what a mistyped post looks like so I can the FULL picture…
Thanks.
Jeff
Julia:
Firstly, thank you for sharing the results of your case study. I wonder if the results of your test would have been any different had you used a term other than “free wesite sumission.” I wonder if there might be an element in the SE algorithm that addresses the word “free” or the concept of “website submission.” Would the results be any different if you used a non-Internet phrase like “bezebal cepes” (baseball caps) or “diabetek recepes.”
-Jonathan
I forgot to mention that I am going to start adding no follow blogs into my strategy of getting my site indexed. I thought they were of no value. I didn’t consider the pure traffic component.
I am new to this and just built my first e-commerce store. I am trying to increase my pagerank and my position in the search engines. I am not sure what you mean by keyword on blogs. Do you mean that for “name” you should use your keyword for which you are trying to increase your rankings? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.
I’m doing comment posting for almost 2 years. I search quality blogs and put comment. Normally, I optimize my page for 4 keywords and I put 5 to 6 comments for each keywords. I select blospot and wordpress blogs.
It helped me to increase me adsense income and opt in subcribers at least 3 times.
In 2006 and early 2007 it was my secret to index all my pages in top 3 search engines. Now I use propeller for the same.
I enjoy doing it and I do it manually. It gives you so many idea……I do not want to open all my secrets…
Very good research. I was told by another source that even though google didn’t search the no-follow that the other big search engines did so it still would help by commenting on them. Every little bit helps, don’t it?
I have to agree with ‘Phoenix SEO’. I’m sure the major search engines are aware of this method to gain PR. It will be only a matter of time before sites are filtered for posting on ‘DoFollow’ sites alone.
An interesting article and although the results proved what most of us expected, it’s nice to see a little research going into proving theories. Keep up the good work, it’s very interesting stuff.
Thanks for taking the time to do this case study and it worked out to what I assumed would happen. I have one question though.
What happens when you link from a “no follow” blog in the comments like this? What effect does that have? Does it count as a “no follow” link or is it only the field where it says “Website”?
Just something I want to get clear.
I never knew before today what a “nofollow” tag was.
I have a self hosted WordPress Blog and I think it uses the ‘nofollow’ tag. Is there a way to get rid of this tag on the comment links?
By the way, Great article. Thanks!
Well, I like your thoughts and I do agree with your idea of placing links in no follow tags just to get some traffic and improving alexa ranking.
Jay answer to you query would be it is not a no follow link but I am not sure if javascript are read properly by robots. Why not simply place : Free SMS or Just the website name??
Overall Link building is the key either it be follow or no follow tag isnt it??
Thanks for the great post…
Cheers,
Rabin
Julia,
thank you so much for sending me e-mail with great information for me. I am very pleased to use your software for commenting. I was commenting only dofollow blogs but without knowloedge I was using different names for anchor keyword spaces. From your post I have learned that I should use anchor keyword % 15 and also comment on nofollow blogs. In some blogs of Matt Cutts I have read that google may counts nofollow links as backlinks. What do you think about this?
Excellent post and well written!
It is always good to up-date website owners of the power of single way back links and the Do Follow websites are perfect for that. The search engines have no option but to take notice of you, and the better ranked the website, the better your chances of a better page rank for your own website business.
As for the No Follow websites.
It may at first seem a waste of time as far as the search engines are concerned, and quite honestly that is the case. However, leaving quality and relative comments on the No Follow websites still offer you a better chance for other web surfers to see your comment and your website address, providing you’ve followed the sensible advice and sign off with your website address as your name!
Remember, it is not just search engines you need to notice you, it is real people you want to take notice of your business website too. After all, it is people who spend money, not search engines.
Thank you for the great advice and keep up the good work.
Hi, this is a great post, and a pretty simple case study.
Good idea, using the mis spelled keywords, since it’s easier to rank well for that, but still get traffic, and I’m sure it lessened the amount of time the case study would have taken to put together.
This post reminded me of something rather important, and as someone who does blog commenting (obviously) I think it’s important that you expand upon the whole anchor text idea.
Simply put, sometimes you don’t want to put your name in where it asks for your name on Leave A Reply section.
Instead, we want to put anchor text in Name area that is relevant to URL entered into Website section.
For the first time ever, I’ve put my anchor text ( Internet Marketing Videos) in as my name instead of my real name.
This is such an informative post I thought I’d help out a little and help explain what you meant by putting anchor text in your blog comments. If you look above you’ll see that my “name” is Internet Marketing Videos and clicking on that brings you to a site relevant to that anchor text.
Thanks,
Dan
OK same question once more: If I have a WordPress Blog on my site how do I know if it uses the “no follow” tag and if it does, how do I change to make it to “do follow” links for my blog comments? And does this “no follow” tag only for the comments and not in the blog postings?
Yep. I am new to this SEO stuff.
Found my answer. I should have read this page first…
(posting the answer here in case anyone else needed this answer too)
The widely used blogging platform WordPress versions 1.5 and above automatically assign the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc). However, there are several free plugins available that automatically remove the nofollow attribute value.
http://snipurl.com/22o55
Now I just have to go look for one of these WordPress plugins.
Found a page full of reviews for these WP plugins…
Comprehensive Reference for WordPress NoNofollow/Dofollow Plugins
Found your research very helpful.
However, near the end of your article, you say the following:
“Also be selective with the anchor text. … You can limit your non-relevant anchors to 15% of your comments and use them on low authority blogs. On big sites, go for the big prize and enter your targeted keyword anchor text.”
This whole area of “anchor text” confounds me! Could you further explain what you meant by the above-quoted statement?
Thanks
John
If your link has the same “anchor text” in all of your blog comments, SE sees that link as spam and will discount it heavily. Better if you vary your anchor text. For example 60% of your link “anchor text” contain your primary keywords, 30% contain your secondary set of keywords and 10% a third set of keywords. Also you can use few times your NickName as “anchor text”.
Excellent info, I’ve been using the fast blog finder, it gives excellent results. I’m also using the directory submitter. The directory submitter is by far the fastest directory submitter I’ve tried. SO far it is working for me.
Julia,
In all of my posts above, and while using FBF I have mostly used my name Tony Lindskog – which creates a same anchor text in the majority of those comment posts, would this count against me as spam?
Hello,
I don’t think the use of your name as the anchor text will hurt you and make your comment flagged as spam unless you submit thousands of comments under the same anchor text. A large number of comments with the same anchor text may seem a bit unnatural to search engines and your links may be devalued.
I think if you put your name and then your anchor text the way I have it looks less spammy. Placing your anchor text alone can make you look as if you’re posting just for the backlink only.
I comment on all blogs, not bothering about the nofollow or dofollow tags.
here is what i do, on every comment while leaving a link in the signature, I add rel=”dofollow”, but I never keep track of my comments or see if they have been approved or not..
I just comment and leave, so does my method make any difference? does this make a nofollow link dofollow.
Julia, please comment on this
Hi Faraz,
No, this method doesn’t work. You cannot change the link type by simply adding the rel=”dofollow”. Only the blog owner can set the “DoFollow” attribute by using the DoFollow plug-in.
Hi Julia,
Thanks for doing the research, I was just talking on the phone with someone yesterday, and we were discussing whether or not google does or does not follow the “no follow” There are people out there that are saying that Google does follow the “no follow” It has been my experience to follow your advice and do a mix of both. I think the key is to work at natural building.
Thanks!
Matt
Thanks for clearing that up, Julia. I guess I’ll have to change my ways from now on
@Matt – Google does follow a nofollow link but does not ‘leak’ any PR juice to that link, so in terms of search engine ranking, you won’t see any benefits from a nofollow link.
This is the best research I have seen to date explaining the benefit of DoFollow. I still don’t understand why Google implemented that or even worse, that blog software like WordPress makes it the default. Internet and blogging is supposed to support communication, not restrict it. In any case, thank you for your research. I’m subscribing!
This is a really cool article. From my experience I was using the nofollow tag on my blog for about 1yr and I got spam like
one or two comments a day. The pros of using “dofollow” your rank does go up because you get better quality comments.
But now I have to get rid of 50 or so spam messages a day.
I found your article very informative.
hi julia,
thanks for the tips and good effort for the research
i always comment for the blog that either dofollow or nofollow
hmm… dont mind that i ask some question out of this topic
does the comment of edu and gov blog give you a better result in SERP?
Thank you for the very well written and insightful article. It seems to me that the use “no follow” tag goes against the whole ethos of blogging which I though was to interact constructively with other websites/blogs in the process creating a web of interconnected links that should be followed by everyone, humans and search engines alike.
Gaining extra credit in the eyes of the search engines is an incentive for people to leave comments and interact with other bloggers – at the end of the day we all publish our blogs and websites to raise our profiles in our own areas of interest and the best traffic generator is to be on Google’s first page for any given key word, so why deny us the benefit of a back link?
The blog owner can moderate posts and so can delete any spammy comments like “awsome, dude!!” – I appreciate that no one wants 50 such comments a day as it takes time to vet them all – but that is part of having a blog at the end of the day.
That’s my opinion for what it’s worth. Nobody has left a comment on my blog yet though…not even a spammy one!
I love this site because I learned a lot from here. Dofollow & Nofollow is something new to my knowledge. I have bookmark this blog for my future referance. Very very helpful! Thank you Julia for making this blog available.
Thank you
This blog about ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ is very helpful for newbie like me. I am not discussing anything here because I am new and haven’t try anything on my own. I am learning and just to give thanks to all of you who discuss about this importance topic here. At least I know a little something, thank you.
@jcnbinns:
I don’t understand either why bloggers use no follow tag, but I guess the reason why is, that people are extremely scared of competitors gaining too much from a backlink! I have experienced that in my own field of interest. I have a deep interest in all kinds of quizzes and try, in a very positive spirit, to build connections and communities with to other sites with the same topic. I usually get absolutely no response to my suggestions on linking or other ideas regarding cooperation.
I guess that this part of the online world hasn’t matured enough yet – a normal business, organization or whatever, would normally take the dialogue or at least respond to the ideas proposed.
I’m beginning to think that Google have created a monster by honouring the nofollow tag and using it as part of their algorithm. Webmasters tend to become obsessed with on-site optimisation and this is just another parameter for them to tweak and abuse. it seems silly that Google is allowing people to sway their results in such a direct way.
I guess I am doing something wrong. I am commenting using my name and not my site´s name (in this comment I didn´t do this since I used your keywordluv).
Should I use my site´s name? Or should I use a keyword?
Claudias last blog post.. Do follow in comments
Hello,
this is indeed a very nice article regarding some myths and some commonly made errors in webmastering. Well i do believe that nofollow will give you some SERPs inprovement as well specially in yahoo. If you check and if you do a backlink check in yahoo you will find that nofollow backlinks do get indexed by yahoo as backlinks and so its bound to give some results in seprs in yahoo.
Hi,
I find it a little strange that people are so ready to jump on this test as a valid piece of data to support that nofollow links are not used by google in their ranking factor. Notice I did not say in their “PR” factor, but rather in their “ranking” factor. Although the research was interesting, I think it is faulty. Here is why.
The most obvious reason is that you used the same website in your testing! How do you know whether or not the Google algorithm just happened to get applied on your nofollow submissions the following day? In other words, you have no way of knowing if the nofollow links were undergoing analysis – being applied a month later, (Which just happened to be the day after your do-follow submissions?
Hey Julia that was a very interesting experiment. It has in fact scientifically answered a lot of questions I’ve had to about these tags as they relate to the SERPS. What really surprises me is that you indicated that the impact didn’t take long to appear as indicated from your quote:
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
On March 4 (the next day after I started the submission to “DoFollow” blogs) my website was on the 1st position in Yahoo.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
That’s a tremendous change in such a very short time. Kudoos!
What I’d like to know is if you’ve ever given thought to whether or not getting backlinks from NON RELATED sites can retard or promote your rankings in the SERPS. I’ve heard a lot of preaching online about the importance of getting links from theme realted websites. But does anyone really know for sure? Has anyone done an experiment along these lines?
I hope it’s not just a simple case of cows following the cows with any concrete data to back up their claims. The Internet is notorious for that sort of thing.
That’s one of the reasons why I love the experiment you’ve done with the tags…because it actually prooved something of merit and value.
I think it would an interesting experiment to take a brand new website with very little competition (something obscure) and work backlinks to the site from NON RELATED websites and see what happens to the rankings!
If the results show otherwise, then we’d all know for sure if non-related backlinks are of any value or benefit.
What’s your thoughts?
Interesting experiment. I have actually discovered that I like to make a comment at a blog, after reading the post. Much to learn out there and many opinions one can listen to. It isn’t that hard to contribute to the flow of the conversation. But I will probably concentrate on do follow sites.
Im glad you have cleared up the dofollow/nofollow debate for us. Obviously the higher up the serps we go the better our site will be but one cant ignore the importance of real human traffic. thats why fast blog finder is so great, you can have the best of both worlds!
Keep up the great work guys!
Hi Faraz,
No, this method doesn’t work. You cannot change the link type by simply adding the rel=”dofollow”. Only the blog owner can set the “DoFollow” attribute by using the DoFollow plug-in.
I’m currently performing my own test of this phenomena…..I do hope that there is some other benefit to noFollow other than just the human traffic….Funny thing about internet advertising is that 5-10 years ago people used to feel that the internet was “free” and open opportunity for all. Now, Google is trying to make it just like the “real world”. Only the connected and rich can afford traffic. The rest of us just scrounge around for the castaways!
How much backlink on comment per day that looks natural? if all of our backlink is build from comment, does google can recognize this and penalize our site?
Hello Julia, Thanks again for the test and post. Wondering if anyone has replicated it 6 months later?
My real comment or question to you and thr group concerns the loss of link quality as these nofollow blogs get hammered with inserted links. Has anyone researched a possible loss of equity over time?
From our experience, the effort of commenting needs to be on-going as these backlinks seem to lose their effectiveness over time – or is it the number of out-bound links on the posts??? It would sure be nice if someone looked into this as thoroughly as your test this spring.
Best wishes all.
Excellent advice, thanks for that.
I have read in many places that nofollow commenting was no use in ranking campaigns but it’s nice to see evidence. One thing I’d like to share, although I have no written down evidence like you have here, is another way nofollows can still be useful.
I try to rank in .co.uk as well as google.com and I had noticed that it’s a lot easier building position on google.com but harder for .co.uk. I started posting on a few .co.uk nofollow blogs and it seems to me that this can effect ranking.
Has anyone else noticed this phenonomen? Again I have no real proof other than what I have seen with my own eyes
By installing Aaron Wall’s SEO plugin for Firefox you can easily check who is using nofollow links on any web page. When enabled, it turn all the nofollow links on web page to red and through this you can easily spot them.
Thank you for your research.
But I have one more question related to this research. What percentage of total traffic could be a “human traffic” from No-Follow blogs. I believe you should have this stats in your Google Analytics. And this info seems very important while making a decision of working or not with NF blogs.
Thank you.
Nice one. I wasted so much time with no follow links before, in the hope i could get some traffic from them. Do follow all the way!
Brillitant. I didnt know these tags existed, i have done the same also, i have watsed time posting on any blogs i could get my hands on just to find out most of them were nofollow blogs
Do follow is the way forward! and up of coarse 
This is really interesting because I have seem ranking improvements using only NoFollow links (as I posted on another one of your posts). This is the first “case study” I’ve seen on this. The only thing I can think is that this was done last march and maybe things have changed. Or maybe there were other factors I dont know about that improved my ranking. Either way thanks for this helpful post.
Hello Julia, I use no follow links, from my site home pages ie; on my easy video producer page, because rightly or wrongly I thought links outbound lose a pages authority and gives it to the page at the other end of the link possibly an affiliate product page?. Where as out bound links on the back pages do not worry me so much as linking is something worthwhile to do.
Hi Julia,
Like many others, I have spent some time on blogs providing real comments and discussion with most of them having a “nofollow” tag. I agree that it might help the human visitor, but I do think that the real value at this stage is to get a backlink to help rankings. We have started a blog on our site and have seriously discussed a little manual intervention for excellent blog posts and to give them a “follow”. Sounds a bit of work I know, but rewarding good commentary that adds real value to the blog seems reasonable. Too many people throw out a comment that is useless such as “good post”, it adds nothing and I think is not respectful to the blog author. If someone could develop some software that the moderator could click on the comment to remove “nofollow” – that would be of real value.
Hey Julia,
It’s been a tad over a year since you posted your experiment and i’m wondering if your results still hold true now. I’m pretty sure that dofollow links still help a site’s ranking, at least from what I’ve seen recently I still think this to be the case. But what i’m more interested in is if nofollow comments still have zero SEO value to a site’s ranking. Cos you would think if you were to provide a quality value-added comment to a high authority blog that it wouldn’t be unreasonable for Google to attribute you for that. I guess the problem therein lies in Google’s ability to differentiate between the two…which seems to me to be near impossible. Which would mean the onus would then fall on blog owners to do that.
Your experiment is valuable, thanks for sharing !
Recently google made a significant change in the way page rank ( aka “link juice” ) is distributed with the “nofollow” attribute – this makes me think they’re going to make more changes in the near future, hopefully for the better and easier for the process of SEO. Yes, spam has always been the issue, but on the other hand is the difficulty when doing normal and useful link building.
Top professionals , entrepreneurs and business savvy minds say – why not both? So I’d suggest you stick with no-follow and do-follow
Thank you for doing this case study – and then writing about it. It was an excellent way to illustrate remove some myths about No Follow links as well as Blog Commenting.
Great Job!
Interesting findings and well presented. Feels good to know that commenting is useful in the long run which your experiment strongly indicates. Would be great if you could follow up on this more times in the future for this particular case too. Nice with the clarification on NoFollow too although I have always been sceptical to the idea that commenting on NoFollow would be bad. That simply doesn´t make sense.
Very interesting article, I had not seen Nofollow attribute as the way you have well expressed, not bringing bringing baclinks but human traffic, I will take into consideration, many thanks for sharing this info
Julia,
Great analysis on follow and no follow links. I, too, was wondering whether blog posts make a difference anymore (seeing as how this practice is becoming so spammy, particularly with all the companies out there writing poor blog posts with no worthy content other than poor writing and 2-3 obvious links promoting a particular website). You’ve confirmed the value of blog links. Thank you.
very useful info! in fact i’ve used some tools like free directory submission and it was really working! i ranked 2nd place in keywords like: Garena master hack and it generates a lot of traffic for my blog. I will try fast blog finder and i target at least a PR of 3 on the next PR update(just a wish!).
I started http://learnspanish.seviourbooks.com/ just one week ago and have spent about 6 hours blog commenting with Fast Blog Finder Gold. Already I am at around position 150 with Google for the highly competitive keyword Learn Spanish Fast. On related ones, with less traffic, I am in the top 20. No doubt about it, DoFollow blog commenting works well.
For me, I like to commenting the article, so even if it’s a “DoFollow” sites, I will look for a good article to read and hard to comment. And I agree with you, “NoFollow” sites will bring traffic (not backlink). I do care about my position in search engine result, but I do more care about what people think about my site and my articles.