No follow?

bamafan

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What is everyone's opinion on nofollow and dofollow? I've never really did any nofollow until recently. Just when I'm linking to an affiliate site.

I have four sites that are in the same niche and the only site that has fallen in rankings (only a few spots) over the last couple months is the site that has the nofollow outgoing links.

I don't necessarily think the drop is related to the nofollow links but was just curious as to others' thoughts. It's not something I have spent a lot of time researching.
 
That's not the reason for your drop. A few spots over the period of months really isn't much at all.

I never intentionally nofollow outbound links. Wordpress does however make outbound comment urls nofollow, so I do have them in my WordPress sites.
 
Google doesn't like aff links and other crap be dofollow. Also it doesn't like good links to legit places be nofollow.
 
When you NoFollow a link you basically give it a Link Weight (if that's the right jargon for it) of 0 which means it passes no SEO value to the target site. It does still divide the total link flow on your own site though.

If you have added X amount of new links that are NoFollow it could well be dicing up your link flow, juice that was previously going to other pages - now being dumped on the floor.

Basically I just don't NoFollow links unless it's an Aff link or if I think there's a remote chance that a competitor may be able to score a link from the site I'm linking out to, or currently has one there.

They're pretty useful, but their usefulness is overstated imo.
 
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RomesFall said:
When you NoFollow a link you basically give it a Link Weight (if that's the right jargon for it) of 0 which means it passes no SEO value to the target site. It does still divide the total link flow on your own site though.

If you have added X amount of new links that are NoFollow it could well be dicing up your link flow, juice that was previously going to other pages - now being dumped on the floor.

Basically I just don't NoFollow links unless it's an Aff link or if I think there's a remote chance that a competitor may be able to score a link from the site I'm linking out to, or currently has one there.

They're pretty useful, but their usefulness is overstated imo.
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I havn't heard about nofollows affecting the flow of link juice through your site, can you site a source for that please so I can read up?
 
RiverStyx said:
I havn't heard about nofollows affecting the flow of link juice through your site, can you site a source for that please so I can read up?
Click to expand...
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

If you check out this post good old Matt Cutts says that they changed this way back when and that NoFollows technically pass along '1 point' and so it still divides the total link flow on a site.

In context of what he's saying, he's actually saying that the NoFollow passes half of what it ordinarily would. Whether that's actually true I don't know, (I think he pulls figures out of thin air) but needless to say regardless of how much value they pass it's pretty damn small otherwise there wouldn't still be the debate out there of whether NoFollow links are worth 'getting'.

Got to say it's not that big of a deal as I just tend to combine pages into one page rather than doing a NoFollow. So something like disclaimer, privacy policy etc just all goes under 'legal' with links to the unique pages from there, or any variant like that and then we're reducing the link flow division, rather than trying to manage it with NoFollow.
 
Thanks for writing that all out, it cleared up all my confusion :smile:
 
I know it's been said but I'll {reiterate|validate|corroborate) that having no-follow OBL's will not affect your ranking. Wikipedia is doing okay with it.
 
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