Can NoFollow Links Hurt You?
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:
- posting comments on the "NoFollow" blogs only;
- 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.
Please, share your thoughts in comments.
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Tags: blog comments, dofollow blogs, find blogs, Link Building
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Filed under: Link Building Tutorials, Search Engine Marketing
@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!
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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.
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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 think we should not omit commenting on “no follow” blogs because we still will get exposure. Especially if the blogs have a lot in common. To start off we should focus on “do follow” to get the direct links then supplement the others.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.