There are many speculations and views provided by SEO experts and professional bloggers regarding this issue. Commonly, we will end up not knowing which one is true or false. So, recently, I have done some research on nofollow link value in Google’s eye. Does having a nofollow anchored link from PR10 website helps you to increase page rank or increase google SERP ranking? The answer is a BIG NO. Nofollow links does not pass any value towards page rank and will not increase serp ranking in google search engine.
However, some may have experienced SERP increase recently due to anchored keyword nofollow links. That is true, but it was just a glitch / “bug” google had earlier days and they have removed it now. Only dofollow links will pass page rank value and helps serp ranking increase in google. If you have been doing link building for google search engine optimization, you need to get dofollow backlinks. Make sure to check page’s PR value and the number of dofollow outgoing links. Any backlinks from bad neighbourhood definitely gonna hurt our ranking, especially if it is dofollow links.
This is an excerpt from recent Matt Cutt’s blog:
Ref: [*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results from Matt Cutts – Page Rank Sculpting
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i do believe no follow helps its its own way but dofollow helps alot more and is better.
Agreed. A combination of dofollow and nofollow is the best in linkbuilding strategy.
when i started doing SEO i wasted a lot of time in getting links from nofollow links but later i realized it doesnt help at all from seo point of view
Nofollow link gives minimum benefit, it is wrong to say it doesn’t deliver any SEO benefits at all. There are other search engines that still gives credit to nofollow links like Yahoo. At least you still gained some backlinks there that will add on more on your profile.
In my views.. (that are totally mine)
Google page rank has very less value that SERP rankiings..
So I must emphasize to work on SERP improvements rather than page rank!
That is something new I read about SERP ranking and PR value. If you want to get quality link to increase your SERP ranking, I suggest you to check below point on the page you are going to get backlinks from:
- is it related to your keyword/niche
- minimum outbound links (both dofollow/nofollow)
- allow you to use keyword hyperlinked with ur website
I’m sure this is not all the factors that can increase our SERP ranking, but this can be a good start.
page rank oh page rank
Nowadays, many don’t really bother about it anymore. It is more important to bring our SEPR ranking to top position.
Thanks Atniz for providing such an important info with full proof.But other than blog commenting there are directory submission and social bookmarking too which helps in SEO as they have the anchor text with them.
Thanks
I agree with you Cathy. We need to get all sort of backlinks from directory submission, article directory, social bookmarking, etc. But, I particularly loves blog commenting.
It’s true abut nofollow. Every day somobody tell us about link bulding, but only Matt Cutt knows.
Agreed. Anyone can say anything, but only Matt Cutt can clear all those doubts.
I am going a bit off tangent with this comment as it is not directly related to your post but since you mentioned about page rank I thought I should go ahead and ask you questions on things I am confused about regarding PR. Here they are:
1.I started with PR3 with one of my blogs and has remained unchanged since then.I have not been updating the blog regularly for a year now and the last update I made was three months ago. I have not done any work at all to get that PR. I got another blog that I update twice a week also with a PR3. Unlike, my other blog I did some link building with this blog. But the rank is not going up. What explains?
2. You are doing a great work to increase your page rank. You pay attention to your content and do an agressive link building to get a good PR. On the other hand there is one blog I have encountered that post crappy pay post content, does not seem to be doing much to get her PR increase in rank but still her blog is ranked PR4. What gives?
I hope you or your other readers could clear this out to me. I am working towards getting a good PR myself.
Hi Julehya,
PR is a little complicated. Regarding your first question – It could be your blog getting good natural backlinks from high authority sites that gives high value dofollow backlinks (low outbound links). Maybe, the value of it’s backlink still remain strong, means not many outgoing links from that pages. And, for second blog that you are actively building links and contents twice weekly, you might getting backlinks from nofollow too much. Concentrate on high PR dofollow blogs and comment. You can see some good results there. It will be easy if you could share the blog addresses here as we I can run some analysis on these two sites.
2. Thanks for your compliment. I used to have PR4 but dropped to PR3 recently due to lack of updating and link building activity recently for this blog. As a dofollow blog, I share my PR juice with my commentators, therefore I need make more high PR backlinks to cover PR leakage from comments. As for your friend, he might get some quality backlinks for her crappy blog. Only backlinks with dofollow value on high PR pages helps her blog to get PR4. And the value of this backlinks is still good. You can share the URL too, I can check this out in detail for you. Email me if it is personal.
I follow Matt’s blog regularly. I tend to agree with Andrew’s comment about disinformation. Other than the run-of-the-mill SEO tips & how to be a good webmaster, you’re unlikely to find a shred of google secrets there. You’re more likely to stumble upon some really good ones at DP if you really pay some attention & dig through the archives.
I agree that we can find some valuable information in DP, in fact we all can learn almost anything about SEO there. But, there are still many people believe nofollow links helps Google SERP ranking. Well, it does not. It may help other search engines like yahoo, bing, etc. Certainly not google.
If the links can be seen at “Google Webmaster Tools,” this means Google is still using them in some strange way.
True there is no passing of page rank, yet the key words in those links are still being “crawled” and counted toward KW relevance in determining SERP.
This explains why its possible for a site with PR 0 to be neck-and-neck with my site’s SERP. (my PR hovers between 3 and 4) Someone with NO Page Rank can still be highly indexed in the search results!!!
All my testing gives the same result so I agree totally with what you’re saying. Never lose sight of the fact the Google is a business and Matt Cutts is a public relations man so disinformation has to be expected at times.
PR does not play any role in SERP ranking. Onsite and offsite plays a the main role there. Maybe, you can try to optimize onsite with better keyword blends. Also, try to get relevant dofollow backlink achored with “Sacramento Weddings”
I’m sure you can beat up you competitors soon enough.
I had always assumed that a no followed link, as well as passing no pagerank and not counting the anchor text, would NOT be shown in the link:mysite.com in Google. However on doing some keyword research on my competitors I am finding a few no follow links having been indexed.
Maybe, that could be one of those bug that Matt was explaining. At least, it benefited us for a short time too.