Do nofollow links have any effect on keywords ranking?

[art247]

Hello, I don't know why more SEOer building nofollow links on forums or blogs. Do nofollow links have any effect on keywords ranking?
Does any one confirm me it's an effective way to increase keywords rankings although it's nofollow links.
Thanks

 

[kenmichaels]

No nofollow links are not that important. The dofollow will help you to rank your keywords.

 

[elcidofaguy]

elcidofaguy

I agree with that... To add nofollow links do help with your backlinking profile with it making it look natural should you be into gaming the serps.... For example if you have to many dofollow links then G may detect unnatural link building.... So having some or even a lot of nofollow links certainly helps...

At the end of the day zero link juice is provided through a nofollow link so it will not help with your rankings on the serps... The exception that I know of is "duckduckgo" whom have stated that regardless of dofollow/nofollow they put more precedence on the authority site providing the backlinks.... e.g. Wikipedia backlinks are nofollow and useless for ranking on Google but helps on Duckduckgo...Saying that Duckduckgo are tiny when it comes to search engine market share... and G clearly states Nofollow is useless for ranking on serps....

That said there can be some good nofollow links which brings traffic such as from social networking platforms, video marketing (youtube) etc as well as of course ads and forums when used correctly... So my best advice is if you can get traffic from a link regardless of dofolllow, nofollow then that is a great thing... but if your aim is to rank on the serps for keywords then dofollow is an imperative that you build that up as mentioned nofollow does NOT pass link juice...

 

[Adenan]

Do follow & no follow is an arguable topic for years. I choose to do both because your off-page SEO will look more normal if you have no follow & do follow backlinks pointing out to your website. People said that no follow doesn't help with ranking, i'm not agree with that..My website ranking better after i do both..the reasons simply because i have more variety of backlinks...that's why even no follow backlinks, it's works for your off-page SEO..

 

[dandeedo]

No, having nofollow links towards your website will not create any negative impact. But you can't rank a keyword if that have only nofollow links. You can't rank that keyword either if it has only dofollow links and that's why to rank a keyword you should have both nofollow and dofollow links.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

I'm sorry, but that part is totally untrue. I've ranked many pages with nothing but dofollow links. There are plenty of other pages in the SERPs doing just fine with nothing but dofollow links too.

And the whole idea posted above that you need to create both to look "natural" or whatever is also a lie. You can rank just fine having never created a single nofollow link.

 

[dandeedo]

dandeedo

I would say you are lucky then. But your day will come in future when Google fires another update about this. If you are in SEO niche you should be always careful. Having only dofollow links doesn't make any sense (or you can say natural) and Google knows about this. It is their game and they will play with you when the time comes!

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

They are not going to make an update like that. That is seriously one of the dumbest things I have ever read. There is nothing gamey about not building nofollow links. Hell, if anything is risky it is building nofollow links in some silly effort to look natural.

Besides, almost every single website will attract a few nofollow links from scraper and aggregator sites out there without ever trying to. Putting effort into building nofollow links on your own is not only a waste of time, but is just plain stupid.

 

[elcidofaguy]

Being blunt - I agree with SEOPub on this... but I do have some concerns re: anchor profile which I will come to in a bit... As mentioned NOFOLLOW links do not pass link juice period...

In fact if you just focus on DOFOLLOW links its inevitable that you will pick up nofollow links whether its from forum, social media, video marketing or other sites etc... Its just a matter of time... Regarding link profile your anchor text diversity is important due to penguin, so I would focus on that in addition to seeking high quality backlinks from sites which G considers authoritative... However that's specific to ranking on the SERPs...

I also feel its real important to diversify your traffic sources so that you do not rely soley on G... Adopting that approach you'll find that you will for sure pickup NOFOLLOW links... For me as long as that carries traffic then I'm real happy i.e. youtube videos, ads, social platforms, web 2.0, blah, blah... etc...

Aiming to get Nofollow links for the sake of nofollow is silly.... Aiming to get links which carries traffic regardless of nofollow, dofollow is a good thing, but one should be aware of the difference when examining ranking positions on the SERPs...

The one question I do have is whether NOFOLLOW anchor text contributes to a backlinking profile which G's penguin algo picks up... I'm not sure but suspect it may... Hence its relevancy to backlinking profile and with it either it contributing to it looking natural or raising a red flag.... For example lets say you have too many commercial anchors which contributes to an algo penalty... One example is whether nofollow links with varied anchor text can dilute that and thus helping you to keep away from penguin? Curious to hear of opinions on that one....

So I suspect there is much more to consider wrt backlinking profile and with taking steps to ensure that it keeps under G's radar, especially when you consider anchor text density ..... I also suspect nofollow may also play a part of G's algo with spam detection.... I dont see why not given its really easy to include nofollow anchor text as part of the algo....

 

[ericplotz1]

Honestly, none of this is going to matter in a minute with the updates coming to "personalized search", conversational search, and the Hummingbird algo.

Google's ranking is going to be based more on computational linguistics, stochastic grammar, latent semantic analysis. It's like AI for the web. A tool to look into for competitive analysis and scraping links would be ikanow.

I'm still learning but you can bet your arse I will beat personalized search and these updates.

So to say nofollow works and dofollow works is like saying "I'm going to live to be 100".

Yes people have done it. But it doesn't mean you will, unless you study health and the way the body functions.

SEO is the same way.

Seems to me like a lot of people base their knowledge off of what others are doing when you should be looking at what the "nerds" at Google have to say at their conferences and meetings. You need to listen to the bloggers that attend those meetings. There is a ton of info on the web about what will rank well and it has nothing to do with dofollow and nofollow. In fact we may even see Keyword ranking die out in the future. There's a ton of info on that as well.