How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of Internet users are unable to post a ‘followed’ link on the World Wide Web? For example Twitter, Facebook, wiki etc. are all ‘nofollow’. It seems only a very small percentage of links count.
Ed, Caribbean
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number1golfer got it exactly right. People used to create their own home page websites. Now days, NOBODY does this, and instead uses social media networks like Facebook as their home pages. This is obviously the problem. This whole idea is a failure. What we have now are a few giant websites and their friends, anybody else is out of the game. Does anyone really think these giant websites would block linking entirely? Of course they wouldn't, because their users would stop using them.
yes !! people do link to my site but with no follow !! Im Mean Who Want hsi Page Rank To Go To Any Other Site even it its batter than him 🙁
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.
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!!!!
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.
The truth is, nofollow is a meaningless tag. Google indexes nofollow! If you want proof, look at your backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools.
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.
@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).
@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
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.
@AlexWebTV ignores, they are dropped from link graph. nofollow link is still better than nothing though
@nqkoi159 yeah, back to those forum profiles and black hat program mentioned 🙂
@evilpuppy damn, why did you tell him about my blog 🙂
@wfime123 spam it everywhere and people will notice and link to it LOL
@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
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… 🙂
@TheSEOBOOK LOL 😉
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.
My best piece of advice is to research your competitors and see HOW and WHERE they got their links from…
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
what a poor answer. Ed must still "grumpy".
You should not spam links on Twitter and Wikipedia…
If you get linked by a widely known blog, then it will count!
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 😛
Does Google value nofollow links in any way? or does it just ignores them?
How is Ed grumpy? He's in the Caribbean!