Do follow and no follow

I know that getting backlinks from do follow sites are very good. But my question is why people make their website do follow and why people make their website no follow ? Suppose if you make a website then which one would you like it to be ? Do follow or No follow ?:slight_smile:

No-follow theoretically discourages people from posting a link just for link juice purposes … although most people with that mindset seem to be too witless to notice that links are no-follow anyway, so they just spam away regardless. :rolleyes:

So that means everyone should make their website no follow ?

[FONT=Verdana]If you have a website and your links are to useful, relevant sites that you think will benefit your visitors, then there’s no reason to make them nofollow. It helps search engines make sense of your site and see it in context if they also see the sites to which you are linking. If, for some reason, you have a few links to sites which are not really relevant, you might choose to make those few links nofollow. If you have a blog or forum where people can post links over which you have no control, you’ll probably want to ensure all those links are nofollow, so that your site isn’t penalised for having spammy links all over the place. External links on the SitePoint forum are nofollow.

Ralph’s point was that making links nofollow in this manner should deter people from link-dropping in the first place, as they will gain no benefit. Unfortunately, the kind of people who indulge in spamming are not usually the kind of people who bother to read the rules/guidelines and find out that the links are nofollow.[/FONT]

But sir as you mentioned that now a days most of the people are spreading spam all over the internet. In this way every site owner would turn their sites to no follow due to a lot of spam. In that case what do you think if there will not be any do follow website on the internet ? I mean from where would get back links for their site ? What would you do in this case if there is no do follow site on the internet ??

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Well, if nobody was getting any backlinks, then I guess we wouldn’t need to worry, would we, because they’d cease to be a part of SEO. :slight_smile:

Seriously, the internet is never going to become nofollow. None of my sites is nofollow, simply because there is no need for it. Only one accepts any kind of user-generated content, and it’s well moderated. The other sites only link to sites which I have chosen to link to. It is much more difficult to get backlinks from sites like mine, because it means you have to build a site of sufficiently high quality that other people will want to link to you. On the other hand, links like these are far more valuable than a link drop on a page with very little relevance and dozens of other spammy links.[/FONT]

And the kind of thinking that no-follow links would be useless and do-follow links would be useful in ranking is narrow-minded.
I am no spammer but i do think no-follow backlinks have some weight in the search algorithms they would be useful in making your backlinks more diversified.

How so? They are supposed to be ignored by search engines.

Hmm… So sir how do you all get do follow back links ??

Each site owner will decide whether to make external links do-follow or no-follow, so you’d have to find sites that allow it and then make an arrangement for your link to go on their site—unless they choose to link to your site by themselves.

Since do follow websites are a few on the internet then I was thinking that what if I do deep linking for my websites like suppose I make a blog and then put an anchor text in it for my keyword and then I do social bookmarking for my blog which has my anchor text in it then will it pass the link juice to my keywords and improve my keyword’s SERP ???

I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that Google won’t care a toss for you efforts. That’s my experience, anyhow!

How so? They are supposed to be ignored by search engines.

And you believe everything that the search engines said is true? :slight_smile:

As i said above, while no-follow backlinks might have less value comparing to do-follow backlinks but they are not completely useless. I think the search engines would still keep track of how many no-follow your sites have and use them in the ranking algorithms.

If you have 100 backlinks (100 of them do-follow) and 100 backlinks (90 do-follows and 10 no-follows) which one you think is better?

I think the second would provide better effect due to the diversity while the first might arouse suspicion from the search engines.

It sounds like you are still just guessing, though. Some research would need to be done to test this in practice.

Yeah, i am guessing, everything about SEO is just guessing but it is all based on common sense. If you think about it rationally, there is no way the search engines would completely ignore no-follow backlinks, they must have to consider it in one way or another.

And what i am saying is not completely baseless, if you utilize SEO tool such as Open Site Explorer or any other backlink tool to check the backlinks of a website, for example:

You will see that they display the percentage of no-follow and do-follow backlinks. And there are also many articles from well-known SEO figures suggested that there should be a fair amount of no-follow backlinks in your total amount of backlinks.

Then again, i do not have the time or resource to conduct all these tests and researches by myself, so i can only believe what i think is reasonable :slight_smile:

I don’t know if a spider follows a no-follow link to see what’s at the other end, but as I understand it, it’s a message to the search engine not to base SERP rankings on such links. That’s what makes sense to me. It’s basically saying to the search engines that, though the link is there, it’s not a link on our site that represents our estimation of the linked site’s merit. So that helps serch engines see the difference between a link that is added to a site by the site owner as a note of approval for the linked page (which is what the search engines are looking for) and a link that is dropped by a passer-by in the hope of getting noticed.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Follow:

to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Personally, I don’t want to be served results by Google based on how many times a site owner dropped links all over the web.

Well, each to his own opinion then :slight_smile:

Why would having no self-generated spam links arouse suspicion? There are plenty of websites that don’t go slobbering spam and self-promotion on blogs, forums and social media sites, and they are doing exactly what Google wants, so what possible reason would there be for penalising them? Google hates people who drop links to their own site - which is what most nofollow links will be - because it makes their job of determining genuine votes that much harder. They are not going to do anything that encourages people to drop self-promotional links around.

Why you would you consider no-follow backlinks as “self-promotional” spam? And actually, if i were to put backlinks on my own sites (my site network, for example), the link would be do-follow.

No follow links indeed don’t add up to the PR but if you have only dofollow links in your link profile this will ring an alarm in google. in my work so far I try to diversify my sites’ link profile with both do follow and no follow. It looks more natural :slight_smile: