Question about No-follow links...

[Rec]

I understand the difference between follow/no-follow, but I've also seen places selling no-follow links with large website for 4 or 5 figure sums. I'm curious what would be anyone's motivation for that? Is it more for the traffic they might deliver, or is there some SEO benefit to a NF link that I am missing?

 

[CCarter]

A lot of those sellers are scamming people that don't know the nuances of nofollow/do follow.

There should be a traffic aspect to anything, however that's no reason for selling $X,XXX to $XX,XXX articles to an unsuspecting individual if the claim is SEO benefit. A lot of those "nofollow" places also allow you to create a free account and upload content yourself.

However - with all that said, there are sites that have settings where the "nofollow" turns into a do follow link after a certain threshold. But like anything you have to be an educated consumer. If you paid 4 or 5 figures for the SEO benefit, you'd better damn well know if the link is a nofollow you got screwed and demand your money back.

There is the line sellers can use like "trustflow" from authority sites - and it makes sense to a degree, it will show that authority sites trust your site to a degree in Google's eyes since a lot of big sites auto no-follow links in articles, but it's still a nofollow link - and if they are touting trustflow only the price shouldn't be that high.

There is also the PR (press release) aspect of it, getting published in a newspaper site or authority site give you brand exposure that takes your brand to a new level since you are worthy of getting published about. But those sellers shouldn't be touting the "SEO benefit" of it - it would just be the PR aspect.

Just My 2 cents.

But not all is lost, there are legit sellers that sell do follow links on mega brands through relationships they've built; like anything in life you'll need to ask for recommendations from people you trust.

 

[Rec]

With that being said, is there any value in blog comments (SEO-wise only) if they are all NF?

 

[CCarter]

With that being said, is there any value in blog comments (SEO-wise only) if they are all NF?

I blog comment for traffic and brand awareness and increasing my own personal brand's exposure within an industry/niche. There are positive reason to add value to an industry's latest article or content piece beyond SEO. If you do things just for SEO... well, you aren't going to be around for very long in your industry.

 

[Rec]

Yes, I totally understand that and feel you should be in the community anyway.
I said for SEO-only to stay on-topic.
I am trying to learn more about SER

 

[Steve Brownlie]

With that being said, is there any value in blog comments (SEO-wise only) if they are all NF?

Basically none unless the comment/exposure/traffic from it leads to more links that are actually followed by the search engines.

We've all seen cases where someone left a mega comment and it lead to a collaboration/guest post/the comment being moved to the main article by the author for further comment etc etc. But aside from strategic commenting to achieve a broader purpose like that and the things @CCarter discussed you shouldn't expect random comments all over the place to have any positive impact at all.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Comments in isolation will do nothing when nofollow. Comments in combination with all other types of marketing campaigns that result in all kinds of links, will do a lot. I ran tests, and admittedly this was 7 or 8 years ago, with only nofollow comments for about a year, carefully using them to craft specific anchor text profiles. I got zero traction at all, and I let it simmer and simmer. Then, when I tossed a single dofollow link at the site, it exploded well beyond the capacity of what a single link would do. I dripped in more dofollows, at a ratio of around 5% of the nofollows, if that. At the end of the day, it over took .gov and .edu sites and became a $2,000+ a month earner that I later sold. This led to later tests with anchor text that were quite revealing too.

Even in isolating they spread your brand's web footprint throughout your industries web. What you end up with is very generalized relevancy signals being sent to your domain. There is, without a doubt, a benefit when Google's spiders are crawling your vertical and always end up back on your site. Take a quick read about the Hilltop Algorithm. While that description is short and describes a very specific use-case in a very generalized fashion, you can see how it applies to what I'm saying. When all roads lead back to your site... well.

As mentioned above, they can be used to help you keep your overall anchor text profile in check, although it should only be aimed at your homepage, so it won't help on individual pages, but it can definitely help in general. Imagine that you need to trip 5 red flags to get distrusted or penalized. Comments can help you not only not trip one of those flags, but can build trust and authority as well. Real sites have a certain anchor text profile on their homepages, mainly consisting of the Brand name and variants of ways to type it, variants on raw URL anchors, and lesser amounts of names like Tom or whatever. Maybe some "here, read it here, over at their website" style anchors too that I don't recommend building with comments.

You can read all of the above and get interested and start researching and become a data nerd, OR you can ignore every bit of it and do one thing:

• Score some comments where you can using your Brand name and a Persona name, within your vertical, and then move on from doing it for SEO's sake and only then do it for marketing's sake.

That's my advice on the matter. The number of referring domains does matter, nofollow or dofollow. But the benefit very quickly diminishes to nothing. Get what you can easily and forget about it. If you do that the way I mentioned in the bullet point, you'll take care of everything I mentioned above as a consequence, without having ever known about any of the details.

In the end, that ends up being the real secret of SEO. The real secret is that on-page SEO is nearly everything, and the off-page comes as a result of marketing. The days of micro-managing data points are gone. That ship sailed. The algorithm is finally to a point where being natural is not only a safeguard from penalization, but it's rewarded exponentially more-so than spamming and dealing with finding sweet spots.

Get some comments, get some forum links, get some profiles, get this and that, these small easy wins will get you moving in the search engine. But nothing beats contextual links within content, and nothing beats getting those links than producing insanely amazing content and getting it in front of as many eyes as possible, whether through social PPC, virality on Reddit and Facebook, or through outreach.

What happens later is, once you're ranking for a ton of terms and have high visibility, you start picking up comments and forum links and contextual links because other people start using you as a reference. The work ends up being done for you by others, by virtue of you having created the best product (content) and being visible (marketing).

 

[turbin3]

The days of micro-managing data points are gone. That ship sailed.

I can't stress the importance of this enough. Search has long since been machine learning-driven and is quickly moving into the artificial intelligence realm. Really think about that. It's fighting a practically impossible battle. There are also algorithms designed to obfuscate all of the metrics, rankings, and signals you'd use to measure it...

I'm sure there are a few ballers out there who have their own advanced architecture and machine learning setups for programmatically analyzing and determining some of their marketing efforts. They might still see some inkling of value in these things. That's probably like 5 people, and they're probably all in-house working for large enterprises that can afford the technological overhead to build it.

For the rest of you, you're wasting your time. The ancients that pioneered these strategies have long since left this world. We only know of them from the hieroglyphics etched on the walls of digital caves, and the parables passed down of their mythical past. Nostalgia and remembering the past fondly is great. Looking to the future is better.