Over this past weekend I was visiting a popular forum where a new member asked if external links they created counted to the overall link count of their page. The first answer they got was “only if the link is a dofollow”.
Up until now I haven’t really weighed in on the nofollow debate but I just can’t sit on the sidelines when advice is given based on just opinion. I’m of the thinking that if your going to offer advice at least back it up with some proof.
Like I said no proof was offered that the nofollow attribute actually is bad for your site. Rather I think it was offered based on mis-information that the user offering the advice has read somewhere in the millions of pages on the topic.
IMHO this kind of advice is total crap!
I’m not going to get into the history of nofollow as there are as many theories on the attribute as there are theories about the Tunguska Event. Instead I’m going to offer “proof” that the attribute has little effect on ranking position. To be totally clear this is not about page rank (PR) it’s about ranking position.
So let’s get to it…
I chose the search term “personalized gifts” and since everyone seems to be fixated on Google I used their search results.
Next I used the Majestic-SEO tool to find the total count of external links to the top 2 ranked sites including the nofollow data. Although this tool might not be the greatest for discovering data I used it because a) it’s free and b) so you could check the results for yourself.
As you can see from this screen shot the #1 ranked site has over 1 million external links of which 12,492 are reported as nofollow.
The #2 ranked site has 224,616 external links of which 9,968 are nofollow.
Clearly the first site has a lot more nofollow links pointing to it but yet it’s in the #1 position in Google.
Looking a little closer at this data the first thing that jumps out is the total number of backlinks for site #1. This alone may be why they hold the #1 position for the given search term but that’s a post for another day.
Now a day’s I really don’t give a rats butt about pleasing the search engines(sorta). I care much more about the human visitor. Besides, less than 1/100th of 1% (or less) of the people that visit your site even know about nofollow/follow. The normal visitor to your site is there for the content.
If you’re business is new to the web do yourself a favor and don’t get caught up in the nofollow party. If you write/offer great quality content that is worthy of a link people will come check you out regardless of your SEO manipulation.
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