Tad's IT Blog
Important for SEO: Digg, Flickr & “nofollow” links
In looking for some good “startup” references to give to a client who wants to be able to do their own SEO, I found a number of them that were listing out good social media services that could be used for link-building. A number of these posts (dated 2009) listed Flickr and Digg both as services which are excellent for posting content and links, and thereby getting some additional search engine juice.
However, in September of 2009, Digg implemented a policy on nofollow links, making all but the most popular items carry a “rel=nofollow” tag in the link, making Google essentially disregard the link, in terms of page rank calculations.
There have been a number of other services which, in 2006, were part of your average SEO staple to quickly and easily generate some back-links for your news or video content. Now, they’re non-entities, with the services switching to nofollow links to discourage link spamming.
Such services that now are void in terms of SEO benefit are:
- Digg: uses nofollow links on all but the most popular stories
- Flickr: HTML in descriptions now automatically inserts “rel=nofollow” into any links.
- WordPress: comments in WordPress.com blogs now automatically insert rel=”external nofollow” into any links, including the link for the website you identify your WordPress user with.
- Faves.us (formerly BlueDot): now all links are rel=nofollow
- Simpy: all links are now rel=nofollow
The good news is, that this allows these services to be used more for what the creators intended them for, instead of an SEO link-spam playground. The bad news is that, for SEO’s and people looking to get continuing benefit from links posted to such services, one has to work a bit harder to find services and sites which will carry links to yours.
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Hm that's interesting, but Google doesn't entirely ignore no-follow to my knowledge. Or do they?
http://martinsoler.com/category/hdr/
about 5 months ago
Well, they’re not supposed to do anything with nofollow links. If you watch your webserver logs, Google does indeed follow the nofollow links, and googlebot will hit the linked-to page, but who knows what they actually do with that information. Technically, they’re not meant to assign page rank to linked-to pages. However, with the prevalence of Twitter and Stumbleupon and other sorts of nofollow-linking social media sites, who knows what algorithm they use to assign any importance or priority to sites that are being discussed on social media venues.
about 2 months ago
woow really great information. thanks for sharing
about 2 months ago
Well from experience, they actually do give pagerank with no-follow links. I did a test had a blog set up with 97% incoming no-follow links. Within a few month it had Pagerank of 4, so they totally take it into account. I guess what happens though is that the site with the outgoing links is less penalized than if they were just normal links.
about 2 months ago
There you go – another example of how you never know exactly what secret sauce Google uses to calculate PageRank. They're not /supposed/ to use noFollow links, but I've noted the same thing — a volume of noFollow links can still seem to generate PageRank in some cases.
about 2 months ago
Wondering "what's left" as far as sites that allow linking without no follow. I'm thinking perhaps brand new 2.0 web sites where the developers didn't think about no follow yet when coding for comments or user generated descriptions. Is that even possible, or is everybody sophisticated enough to add no follows? And how can you tell? View the source I suppose.
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I agree with iphoneTad. Who knows what Google and co are doing with the information. With so many blogs and social media sites utilising nofollow, some value must be assigned to the data in the nofollow links.
about 1 week ago
Indeed. For example, all comments on WordPress posts are now tagged as “external nofollow”. However, if I go on a discussion rampage and throw a bunch of comments on WordPress blogs, for whatever reason I then see a surge in organic traffic about 1-2 days later. Can’t totally explain it, but again – there’s something in that secret sauce that they’re not telling us.