Thursday

The Myth Of NoFollow Tag

Nofollow tag is an automated tag on every blog now and almost on all sites too that accepts user suggestion as comments or via guest book. So what is this tag and what's its purpose?

rel=

According To Wikipedia (Yeah wikipedia knows SEO too)
"nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index."

According To Google
"When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."

nofollow tag look like this



Many webmaster and SEO's believe the wikipedia and Google definition for nofollow tag that is nofollow tag effects a site ranking in Google Search Results. In many seo and webmaster forums we have seen a lot of debate on this issue, which always result in two conclusion. One is of course according to google point of view, that nofollow effect ranking position. But there is also some SEO who believe in somethin else. According to them NOFOLLOW only effects pagerank of a webpage and not ranking.

According to those SEO's
"The new nofollow link tag is supposed to provide webmasters with the opportunity to add a link to their website without leaking PageRank to the page they are linking to."
According to PageRank Theory
All links on a page which have some page rank got equally divided part of that pagerank to them too. This phenomena also known as Page Rank Dilution.
Here is a complete info about Page Rank: Google Page Rank

For example If a page has 4 page rank. And it contains 10 links on it of other websites than these 10 links get equally divide Page Rank Love from that page. This will increase the page rank points of those 10 pages, have their links on that page.

So what is the reality? Which theory is true and which one is false?

And yes! you may not believe it but 2nd theory is true.

It has been experimented by ME (OK I am not giving you any single detail of those experiments for the obvious reason, but sharing with you the proven result. So still I am good) and many other SEO'z too that link with nofollow tag doesn't affect a web page ranking. In fact it may count as a normal link and play its role in enhancing your ranking as number of links increases.

And since nobody caring a damn about Page Rank now days except Google itself, so these nofollow tags are pretty USELESS. For prove, you can analyze backlinks of some sites on 1st page of google and amazed to find that many of them have their links from blogs using nofollow tag. May be you can't see them for highly targeted keywords but remember Google is sorting out result manually for those keywords. Giving you a little common sense hint that if a page has 5 page rank with 100 links pointing to it from other blogs and you have a nofollow link of your website on that page, what do you think your link worth? Or lets have a fun experiment...Find an .edu blog and comment on some post of it. In NAME section put your keyword or simply put your web page url in comment. Since all blogs have nofollow tags installed automatically, so your this link is a nofollow link. After some days you can see this link as your edu backlink and an increase in your website authority.

So I am not advising you to do spam blogs via comments, but to acknowledge you that nofollow tag is only a myth and it doesn't negatively effect your ranking or its only a myth that a link with nofollow tag have no benefit.

So! Happy commenting.

P.S. In upcoming days I will surely post on importance of .edu and .gov links and how to get them. So better subscribe to RSS cause you certainly don't want to be the one left behind.

27 comments:

Anonymous said...

I strongly believe that even adding link in comment with nofollow helps you in increasing rank.

Anonymous said...

I agree - nofollow tags are useless - it took me a bit to figure out how to get them off blogger (all the info I found was on wordpress plugins), but I finally got it off - thanks for the information!

Anonymous said...

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-google-yahoo-askcom-treat-the-no-follow-link-attribute/4801/

There is what Ask, Google, and Yahoo! all claim about nofollow. I still don't fully accept that it is a myth.

Unknown said...

nofollow is definitely useful, check out the SEO Fast Start E-book if you want to understand why.

I'm not at all affiliated with that book btw.

Anonymous said...

And here I was thinking I was telling google to stop following the link period. You learn something new every day.

Anonymous said...

I guess the best way to know the truth about this nofollow debate is self-experimentation. Your site will be the better judge.

Anonymous said...

I am also agree with 'Jay', that adding nofollow helps you in increasing rank.

Anonymous said...

Makes perfect sense to me. How can you tell if the no-follow is there in the 1st place.
Thanks for this post. You made it clear.

Anonymous said...

What a great post, great experiment & great blog! I'm so glad I found it! Tried to RSS subscribe but it doesn't work!
Please fix. I bookmarked you & will be back.

Anonymous said...

I forgot to ask you how you can see this .edu link as your .edu backlink and an increase in your website authority? How do you check to see where your backlinks come from?-Thanks

Anonymous said...

I have to totally agree with you on this. On one of my sites I commented on a few blogs. At that time I didn't even use my keywords as my name (sorry I will do it on your blog -- i hope you don't mind) however, after a few days I saw google bot coming to my site from that particular blog. I mean it didn't give me a boost in PR and quite frankly I don't really care about. I love to see it go up but I have not seen any direct correlation between that, traffic, or even serps.

Anywho, thanks for the post. It was very well written.

Ken G

Anonymous said...

I don't really agree with you.

I would say google accepts this nofollow meta when he agrees with the owner that this function is required on the site. How he determines that this is required, only google knows.

People should consider this nofollow thing as a block for google to see their site.

Anonymous said...

interesting. I learnt something today...

Anonymous said...

I have noticed that google counts no follow links as valid links.

Anonymous said...

if u use meta nofollow in head, yes google won't follow any links and menu too to index other pages, but if u use rel-nofollof it's 50/50 for links u choose. I have about 10 projects and on some of them - on 5, I links are still following. and about wikipedia, admins telling that it's silly to put any links here, I made an experiment on it, puted my blog on it and after 3-4 hours I got rank #1 from #10
thanks

Anonymous said...

I have been experimenting with this and have found that Google is giving my site backlinks even from sites with nofollow tags. By the way, Firefox has a great plugin that will "identify" links on a page that are tagged nofollow. The name escapes me at the moment though.

Anonymous said...

So should we use the nofollow tags or not ?i am still in a confusion about it

Anonymous said...

I just see the advertise of a free nofollow blog or I do follow as a way to incite users to leave comments in the hope that their PS will increase.

Particularly for those blogs that, despite having good content, are either new or have little traffic, offen visitors don't leave comments if they see nobody else does it.

Better to have a genuine comment from one that seeks the dofollow that a fake comment from yourself :-)

Anonymous said...

Great article which has put my mind at ease.

I am completely baffled by PageRank and, in particular, backlinking. I have sites that have loads of links pointing at the site, yet when I try the 'link:www.domain.com', I get nothing.

global call center outsourcing said...

Well, I am not 100% sure whether nofollow helps a little bit or it doesnt. I will believe it when i try it and find out. But, I good discussion. As far as the google toolbar PR is concerned, i would say, this is the smartest thing Google did after launching google. Maybe millions of site owners still feel proud about their Toolbar PR. :)

Anonymous said...

Wow, you really open my eyes. I never thought that nofollow tag can be helpful. Thanks for revealing the myth!

Mind Booster
http://mind-booster.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Its always good if u dont care about the no follow or do follow Just keep on commenting on blogs with ur name it doesnt look like spam ...

Good post thanks ...

Anonymous said...

I strongly believe that even adding link in comment with nofollow helps you in increasing rank.This is what JAY said.İs that true???

Anonymous said...

thanx for text

Anonymous said...

nofollow can be useful for on-page link optimization - for controlling your link equity, according to Erin Wall of SEOBOOK.com. I wonder if an unnatural ratio of dofollow : nofollow links would trigger any flags with google.

FireEar Home Alarm said...

Barry J, that plugin you were mentioning but couldn't recall the name is: Search Status

It's a great plugin for those who believe that leaving dofollow links are the only ones important. It highlights all the nofollow links on a page with a pink background.

Showcase Talent said...

Good informative post. Thanks for sharing it.