Can NoFollow Links Hurt You?

56 Responses to “Can NoFollow Links Hurt You?”

Mohd. Hashim Khan, on March 25th, 2008 at 3:54 am Said:

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!!
internet marketing, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:00 am Said:

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!
Julia, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:11 am Said:

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.
Tony Lindskog, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:23 am Said:

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.
Naples, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:25 am Said:

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.
Jeff, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:31 am Said:

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
online business opportunist, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:35 am Said:

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
Ray Randall, on March 25th, 2008 at 4:52 am Said:

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?”
Steve, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:12 am Said:

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
Gluten Free Tips, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:15 am Said:

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.
Ballon Rides, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:27 am Said:

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.
Myspace Proxy, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:27 am Said:

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.
Best Diet Plan, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:32 am Said:

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
Merilee, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:40 am Said:

Thanks for saving me the time to research this. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself. Your results confirmed my theory.
Chief e-Giftologist, on March 25th, 2008 at 5:50 am Said:

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.
Celine Dion Tickets, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:05 am Said:

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
Horse Racing System, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:34 am Said:

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!
Julia, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:37 am Said:

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.
Take a Quiz, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:42 am Said:

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
Walt Webb, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:44 am Said:

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
Drug Testing Products, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:53 am Said:

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…
Phoenix SEO, on March 25th, 2008 at 7:16 am Said:

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.
Jobs Calgary - Jeff, on March 25th, 2008 at 8:41 am Said:

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.
Free Outsource Compendium, on March 25th, 2008 at 9:11 am Said:

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
Jonathan Ginsberg, on March 25th, 2008 at 9:14 am Said:

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
DebtFreeDave, on March 25th, 2008 at 9:56 am Said:

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.
Abby, on March 25th, 2008 at 10:04 am Said:

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.
Rita, on March 25th, 2008 at 10:08 am Said:

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…
wayne | hardwood flooring, on March 25th, 2008 at 10:21 am Said:

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?
William, on March 25th, 2008 at 12:30 pm Said:

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.
Genius, on March 25th, 2008 at 2:03 pm Said:

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.
Jay | Ad Infiltration Review, on March 25th, 2008 at 2:03 pm Said:

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.
Joni Solis, on March 25th, 2008 at 6:45 pm Said:

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!
Rabin | Free SMS, on March 25th, 2008 at 8:23 pm Said:

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
Kutlu Sevin, on March 26th, 2008 at 1:20 am Said:

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?
John From Honest home business, on March 26th, 2008 at 3:58 am Said:

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.
Sincerely,
John from honest-home-business.com
Internet Marketing Videos, on March 26th, 2008 at 4:05 am Said:

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
ipod_bargains, on March 26th, 2008 at 6:32 am Said:

I’ve been of the opinion that a “nofollow” command would render your post to be of no value, but your explanation of each command has been very enlightening. So, I will place my blogs at either as the situation arises. Thank you.
A Love for Horses, on March 26th, 2008 at 8:29 am Said:

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.
A Love for Horses, on March 26th, 2008 at 8:40 am Said:

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.
A Love for Horses, on March 26th, 2008 at 8:54 am Said:

Found a page full of reviews for these WP plugins…

Comprehensive Reference for WordPress NoNofollow/Dofollow Plugins
John, on March 26th, 2008 at 9:50 am Said:

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
Julia, on March 26th, 2008 at 10:53 am Said:

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”.
pictures of new zealand, on March 31st, 2008 at 2:27 pm Said:

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.
Joomla Views, on April 1st, 2008 at 6:54 am Said:

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?
Julia, on April 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 am Said:

Hello,

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?

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.
Jay | Ad Infiltration Review, on April 5th, 2008 at 9:27 am Said:

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.
Faraz Ahmed, on April 12th, 2008 at 7:09 am Said:

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
Julia, on April 14th, 2008 at 4:59 am Said:

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.
matt | Unlimited Movie Download, on April 14th, 2008 at 9:40 am Said:

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
Faraz Ahmed, on April 14th, 2008 at 10:39 am Said:

Thanks for clearing that up, Julia. I guess I’ll have to change my ways from now on
Tony from Joomla Views, on April 14th, 2008 at 10:50 am Said:

@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.
peter from Peter Answers, on April 22nd, 2008 at 8:22 am Said:

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!

peter’s last blog post.. Does Peter Know Our Future?
Larry Rivera, on May 1st, 2008 at 3:42 am Said:

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.

Larry Rivera’s last blog post.. Web 2.0 Graphic Equalizer
Stewart from best diet pills, on May 10th, 2008 at 7:01 am Said:

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?
jcnbinns from landscape photography, on May 13th, 2008 at 4:46 am Said:

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!

Rules: Enter Your Name@Your Keywords (example: Julia@Fast Blog Finder) into the Name field and KeywordLuv will use Your Keywords as the anchor text. No inappropriate or offensive comments. No links to inappropriate or offensive sites. Comments must contribute to the discussion.

Step I. Submitting comments to "NoFollow" blogs

Step II. Submitting comments to "DoFollow" blogs

56 Responses to “Can NoFollow Links Hurt You?”

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