Comments on: Can NoFollow Links Hurt You?

By: Vass@Organic Carpet Cleaners Surrey

Vass@Organic Carpet Cleaners Surrey — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:28:34 +0000

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.

By: Rob@Bike Jackets

Rob@Bike Jackets — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:21:44 +0000

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.

By: Geoff@online marketing strategy

Geoff@online marketing strategy — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:17:44 +0000

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.

By: sean@easy video producer

sean@easy video producer — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:30:54 +0000

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.

By: Linda@Mouth Sores

Linda@Mouth Sores — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:33:19 +0000

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.

By: Jamie Montgomery

Jamie Montgomery — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:24:46 +0000

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

By: Leather Stools

Leather Stools — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:00:07 +0000

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!

By: Paul@ForeverFashion designer discount store

Paul@ForeverFashion designer discount store — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:11:29 +0000

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.

By: Web Design

Web Design — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:24:01 +0000

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.

By: dave@irish gift shop

dave@irish gift shop — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:21:20 +0000

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