The original purpose of NoFollow was to stop comment spam on weblogs. Exactly what is comment spam? Comments posted for the sole purpose of establishing an outbound link in order to inflate PageRank or promote commercial services, automated by web bots. They are easily identifiable since they regularly consist of non sequiturs, self-contradictions, and/or comments totally unconnected to the original topic, not to mention countless spelling and grammatical errors. And they constantly include a link. A typical post might be “I disagree with some points, but think your write-up is actually terrific.” Any internet application which accepts and features links submitted by visitors is a prospective target. Content management systems such as wordpress are huge for website design and weblogs and make extensive use of comments. Such comments are very obvious.

The expansion of comment spam had indeed come to be a systemic issue on blogs, wikis, guestbooks, and other publicly accessible discussion boards. In some places, it was difficult to hold a coherent conversation since so much spam was being posted. And while there had actually been lots of attempts to combat the problem (such as CAPTCHA validation, preventing specific keywords, disallowing consecutive submissions, or disallowing links completely), none of the fixes accessible at the time were making a substantial difference. So in early 2005 Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger.com’s Jason Shellen created the NoFollow attribute to attend to the situation.

NoFollow tells search engines “do not use this link to influence PageRank,” which virtually reinvented blog comment areas over night. Four years later on, it is still feasible to discover opinion spam, but it’s less than one percent the issue it used to be.

What NoFollow does not do: it can not block access to material, or avoid content from being indexed by search engines. (This functionality can be supplied by other methods, such as the Robots Exclusion Standard.)

In addition, individual search engines translate the use of NoFollow in different methods. Google (which participated in the design of NoFollow to begin with) will certainly not use the link for ranking or index the “linked to” web page, and will certainly not display the link or pass anchor wording to search results unless the page has indeed currently been indexed. Bing behaves virtually identically, however will always display the links. Yahoo! will definitely not use the link for ranking functions, yet will definitely constantly index connected web pages, show links, and pass anchor wording to search outcomes. Ask.com disregards the NoFollow characteristic entirely.

So what are DoFollow links, then? It’s an internet slang term, which just means a link is not making use of the NoFollow characteristic, and can for that reason be made use of to provide PageRank power.

SEOMoz recently reported in their 2011 ranking report that a correlation exists between ranking and the presence of no follow links.It seems that the search engines are looking at the ratio of do follow links to no follow links. If there are too many do follow links, the link profile appears to be unnatural. The search engines expect that in the normal course of link getting, links from both do follow and no follow sites are normal.

So, if you look at your site link profile and it has a high ratio of do follow links, you need to go to no follow blogs, social media bookmarking sites and other sources of no follow links to improve the profile.

What About Authority?

It’s probably true that PR is not passed with a no follow link. . That may or may not be the case, but let’s say it is. My question has been for some time now, even if no PageRank is passed, is a link from an authority site related to the linked to site valuable?

Many SEO specialists and teachers have been saying for years to ignore the no follow attribute. They say is a link is a link and their testing shows it doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s no follow. I’m wondering out loud, if link juice is not passed through PR, are other signals being used to determine authority and relevance.

Search Engine Algorithms

For a lot of reasons, search engines are designed and tweaked to provide the best result for search queries. The algorithms look at off page and on page factors. We’ll look at off page factors. A link from a site provides a vote to the destination site. If the link is no follow, the PageRank (PR) is gone, but I’m thinking other signals in the algorithm are present that make the link from an authority site valuable.

With Google stating that there are over 200 signals in the algorithm, and others saying it’s many more, why wouldn’t they be including the relevance of the link in relevance factors.

Let say that two sites have content that is of the same quality. There’s nothing to choose between them. Based on on page factors, it’s a dead heat. Still, one ranks higher than the other. Why?

On site factors are the same, so the ranking must be based on off site factors. These sites have the same PageRank profile. Each has 500 links with the same anchor text, the same PR profile and the same distribution of do follow and no follow links.

I am submitting that where the links come from is an overlooked factor. If the first site’s links are mostly from sites related to the content, while the second site get its links from general or non-related sites, the first site will rank higher. I don’t think many would argue the value of relevance, but I’m firmly suspecting that no follow links are passing relevance signals even if they’re not passing PR.

A New Life for No Follow Links?

So, just maybe, no follow links have value after all. How much we don’t know for sure, but if the engines know it’s no follow and still record the signal, there’s go to be one or more reasons. We believe there’s a link profile signal. The question is, are there relevance signals in the algorith for no follow links? I do not advocate ignoring the value of the do follow link, but it appears that in our SEO and local SEO programs, we need to pay attention to assuring we have good quality no follow links too.

Leave a comment in this blog and you will get a do follow link. Follow the instructions in the comment section to get a good keyword link to your site.