Why are links used in ranking when they all have the nofollow attribute?

[careerhuntsville]

thanks, great info

[aseohosting]

awesome clip .. thanks and god bless =)

[sesshoumaru3st]

I have a question for Matt,how many of those Do-followed links are PAID links and link schemes? It's easy to say hey,few no-follow and lots of do-follow.It could be that most of those links are paid and are generated through black hat SEO techniques.V-V I could take the guess and say MOSTLY BLACK-HAT methods.Plus,when you're on webmaster forum they encourage you to add no follow tags to affiliates. Face it Matt, there are only a few willingly given links out there.I am a fan of Google's methods.

[sesshoumaru3st]

V-V The guys working at Google are geniuses.I'll give them all the respect they should get.See,this is what Google wanted in the first place. Putting the fear that giving out do-follow links will lower your PR,so that this way webmasters will only link to what they really like.Therefore,making sure only the best of sites get do-follows and rank. Very IMPRESSIVE INDEED!!!!

[nattsurfaren]

I don't think Matt / Google is thinking clear. Not everyone are into the link bait/entertainment/Celebrity business. Some people actually sell things that uninteresting to 99% of the people and interesting to 1%. So if 1% of the people are for example company employees how likely is it that they are going to put a link on their company website that are managed by a completely different apartment of the company.

[ferodynamics]

The truth is, nofollow is a meaningless tag. Google indexes nofollow! If you want proof, look at your backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools.

[brianpfitzgerald]

To say that people should make their own websites if they want their links to "count" is a very poor answer. That is not how the majority of internet users share or want to share content and information with their networks. I would hope that despite the nofollow attribute Google is still able to look at and consider signals from the social world to help identify content and factor into rankings. I would hope that this is already in place and maybe just something that can't be discussed in detail

[seopodcast]

It would be interesting to know what percentage of links are no follow. I am sure they have the stats. It would also be interesting to see a break down of the hosters of those no follow links. Does Facebook represent 5%(or some number) of no follow links?? How else is a major hoster of no follow links??

[polyglut]

what if some ad service site does not let you use the nofollow? e.g. am using text-link-ads?

another Q: my site xahlee.org was ban'd for google adsense in 2005. Is there a way to resubmit?

another Q: earlier this year i made a mistake of selling links to some bad seo sites for ~3 months before i learned nofollow. I think google already punished my ranking. Anything i can do about this?

thx.

[lisa3876]

If people spent more time writing unique content and worked on developing a fresh perspective for their topic, they wouldn't have to spend all day stressing out over which links are dofollow and which aren't. I got started on the web a lot earlier than most so I had an advantage but even today I still get TONS of dofollow links just from people who happen to like my site and give me a free dofollow link without me asking. Amazing concept aint it? ;)

[TheMegaMcadam]

The trouble is that my competitors all spam like crazy (you know blog spam, forum spam, directories etc etc) and it works :(. So I've started doing it too - enough to get me back on page 1, but I'm not as dedicated as the competition (1000's of spam links)

I think google is losing the battle and I'm starting to use bing and yahoo more and more - most SEOs aren't interested in these and they do often throw up better results.

[jasonglaspey]

I don't think anyone is arguing that quality content gets good links. But the question remains, my wife/sister/mom/kid brother all use social media to share quality content with their friends. They don't blog or run websites. And to ignore those "votes" for my quality content seems to ignore indicators of quality. Especially if your site is about youth culture, or other category of audience who don't build websites to share information.

[ScienceAround]

so, do you mean that my wikipedia spamming and 10,000 blog post package I bought are useless? damn! Matt says "make your own website and post a link there", I guess back to link farms and sponsored blog reviews then... :)

[subrealms]

watch?v=x4UJS-LFRTU Same ignorant answer since 1.5 years.

[subrealms]

Agreed with kevingreenfingers. The response in this video isn't as insightful as we're used to.

[kevingreenfingers]

Sorry Matt, but I'm not sure this argument stacks up.

1. It's not the %age of total links, it's the %age of NEW links that matter

2. You seem to just brush aside the fact that you are ignoring those links from the larger more sophisticated sites (and many blogs)

3. You seem to be implictly encouraging building new sites to provide links to main site -- surely not.

These vids are always very imformative but I do feel in this instance you have failed to address the big issue.

[50kT]

YEA BECAUSE THE DO FOLLOW LINKS ARE SPAMMED. NO FOLLOW IS MORE REPUTABLE RIGHT NOW

[vxcriss]

At this time I really do not see any reason why I would do a non-nofollow link on my own website. Why should I loose any part of my hard earned PR by linking to others. I'm dropping nofollow on all the links I make without even thinking twice about them. And I think everyone is doing this, ultimately everyone will have nofollow links and nobody will ever get any PR. Google, how about finding a way to positively compensate pages with do-follow links so people have a reason to create them.

[ScienceAround]

@vxcriss learn better how pagerank flows. every nofollow link on a page decreases amount of pagerank passed by do follow links. nofollow links are NOT the way to sculpt page rank in our days

[netandful]

@ScienceAround dud dont mislead people here, PR is just one ranking factor out of like 50 more, and im very happy to let u guys know that nofollow links form auth sites in massive amounts do result in a serp boom, just try bro, linkbaits work so good even being nofollow, i know this because im becoming rich soon and sometime years ago i also had many doubts

[BBATLI]

@vxcriss -- you dont "give away" or "lose" your own PR when you link out!! You just give the other site a referral, and the importance/value of your referral depends on how high your PR is.

No follow says "dont take this link as a recommendation" -- because of whatever reason - eg. someone ELSE could have posted it as a comment to your blog article, or as a reply in your forum, or be spamming facebook (if you're mark).

[vxcriss]

They came up with PR and then invented the nofollow attribute and now nobody that cares about their own pages will link without setting nofollow in order to preserve their own page PR. When users start to create their websites with concern to how Google sees their site then Google has failed their own policy. They tell everyone that you should create your site with concern to your users and at the same time force you into setting nofollow on all your links so you don't loose your own PR.

[elvispaul7]

My best piece of advice is to research your competitors and see HOW and WHERE they got their links from...

[TechieGeek1]

People who check if a link will be nofollow or not before they create the link should not be the kind of people ranking high. 

[wfime123]

But how will anyone link to your *great* content if they can't find it in the first place?!

[ScienceAround]

@wfime123 spam it everywhere and people will notice and link to it LOL

[TheSEOBOOK]

Well - you guys know the true definition of SPAM? Search Results Placed Above Mine :-)

[ROCKNTV1]

@TheSEOBOOK LOL ;)

[evilpuppy]

I saw a 2 weeks old blogger blog with 1 post (only 2 paragraphs) ranking on 2nd page of google for a high volume keyword (1 word, 2.500.000 results without quotes, 60k searches in exact).

What was the linkbuilding strategy, you might ask? Well, here is the funny part!

Profile links - 850 of them made with a blackhat program. I won't name it.

So yeah... shame on you, google! We whitehat SEO struggle hard and one black hatter unleashes the XR..... and pfft.

[daveashe]

@evilpuppy yeah, and in the process destroys the internet by making it useless and full of spam. I and other forums engage in constant battles to remove your spammy links. What a prick.

[ScienceAround]

@evilpuppy damn, why did you tell him about my blog :)

[andruha11234]

I had a really popular website write a blog post about my site, but all of the linking they did to me was nofollow. :( People just think that any dofollow link is bad for their site and are not using it for any outbound links

[perhenre]

what a poor answer. Ed must still "grumpy".

[boukevanderbijl]

You should not spam links on Twitter and Wikipedia...

If you get linked by a widely known blog, then it will count!

[Robbertbiz]

Very, very good question, poor answer. Google should defintitely do something about this problem.

[ShmulikLiebermann]

I'll rephrase the question: "how the hell do you expect me to spam my links all over the internet when the sites owners restrict all the guest links to be no-follow???"

I cant believe you waisted time answering this guy.

[nqkoi159]

You are looking for free links in the wrong places my friend :). There are many many ways to get many free links, they are just not so obvious as just going on twitter or facebook. But I am not telling you more :P

[ScienceAround]

@nqkoi159 yeah, back to those forum profiles and black hat program mentioned :)

[singhsupremacy]

Most of the follow link he is counting are those that won't give you backlink.

[DutchPow3r]

I take nofollow links to, i know that they help my ranking, tested it a view times on new .info domains for middle of the road keywords ( around 50K results in exact search) and i always came out on the first 3 spots for my keyword the only thing is that i don't get a PR, fuck that PR doesn't bring me cash, high listing does

[applesauceman]

stop counting blog spam links.

[AlexWebTV]

Does Google value nofollow links in any way? or does it just ignores them?

[Robbertbiz]

@AlexWebTV Good question!

[ScienceAround]

@AlexWebTV ignores, they are dropped from link graph. nofollow link is still better than nothing though

[iLovePalestineDotCom]

You shot yourself in the foot with the nofollow tag because in order to defeat spammer you've created an equally bad or worse problem. SO MANY important sites that otherwise would be voting for a external sites are currently NOT voting because of the overwhelming stinginess with follow links. Why leave ANY LINK as a follow when that can not help but hinder your site by leaking PR. Sculpting is now done at a massive scale that Google PR is now unrepresentative of the web. Google FAIL!

[mattdiehl12]

How is Ed grumpy? He's in the Caribbean!