I have just read an article that says no follows now leak link juice?
-
I have just been reading a really interesting article about link juice.
The way I read the piece the author was saying that there has been a change in the way link juice is blocked with 'no follows.'
The author seemed to say that there has been a change and now even if you add a 'no follow' onto a page that the page will still send link juice to that page. I may have read this wrong.
I just wanted to check if anyone else had heard this at all?
Many thanks
-
I agree with Mike, this is the article I was going to point you towards.
So in summary: You can stop yourself from passing page rank to another site by adding a nofollow but you cannot save yourself from losing link juice by adding nofollow. This has been the case for several years already (If you go on what Google is saying).
-
Hi Oliver,
In the research I have done on this subject, between 2005 and 2009 the NoFollow directive was used to preserve link juice and keep it from passing through to the particular link. This would allow you to reallocate that link juice to other, more important links on your page. It was mainly developed to discourage comment posters from spamming sites with misc. links; however, web masters soon figured that you could "link sculpt" your site... more or less hoarding your link juice and only pushing it through to your really important pages... making them rank higher.
In 2009 things changes. Matt Cutts commented on the subject saying, "So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each." - more or less stating that link juice is discarded and not reallocated.
Matt Cutts also says, "Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank." - So while the PageRank flows through the link, it is discarded, and is not passed to the linked to page.
"The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results." - Matt Cutts
I don't know if the subject of the article you were reading was about sculpting your site, but depending on who you talk to, there are many other tactics that can give you a higher ROI.
I hope this helps answer your question.
Mike
-
While there has been extensive debate to the value of 'nofollow' it's best not to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of it all. Here's the mantra I follow when dealing with links:
1. Ask yourself does your reader REALLY need this link. When in doubt, go without! Conserve your link juice as much as possible but put the user first.
2. Is this the right place for the link - remember links placed higher on a page and in mainstream content react differently that footer or sidelinks.
3. Is this an authority site? If yes I won't nofollow it, I encourage Google to know I'm linking to high-end authority. Otherwise, I'll nofollow the site.
Last but not least consider that either nofollow plugs a page leak or it doesn't, but it certainly doesn't penalize you - so wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry and use it anyways?
-
Hi Oliver,
No Follow links do not leak link juice but there is a new concept in SEO called co-citation. Basically Google and other search engines are using mentions (semantics) http://moz.com/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday to determine how to rank your website. I suspect this is Google's effort to try and reduce spam and the linkbuilding business. The more mentions you get the better your website will rank and especially if the website has authority
Thanks
Carla
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I want to know about the Impact of Do-follow backlinks and No-follow backlinks for increasing DA.
Have Do-follow backlinks and No-Follow backlinks same value to increase Domain Authority in Moz? Recently, I have created 290 profile backlinks which was do-follow. But from yesterday I have seen all backlinks are no-follow now according to the decision of sites' owners. My site's DA has already increased up to 35. Will this DA fall gradually from now? Apart from it, if I have created same backlinks for my another site; will my DA be 35? Please try to clarify it. My site is: Homeworkpaper.net Thanks. Waiting for your valuable answer.
Link Building | | darrellpc1 -
Displaying 10 blog-posts from website homepage: Any loss in-terms of link juice?
Hi community, We started showing 10 blog-posts from our blog on our website homepage. Will this hurts us anyway by taking away link juice? Thanks
Link Building | | vtmoz0 -
Are charity/sponsorship links good, bad or just useless?
Some facts: We will probably only doe this 2-3 times a year (we have hundreds of links coming in each year from organic sources). This is for a really prestigious charity website with very nice link profile from other non-profits, news organizations, and even government websites. We will get a logo on their sponsorship page, with a link back to our site. Some articles say Google considers this "buying a link" and will therefore penalize you. Or at best, this will have no effect. And here's a Search Engine Land article saying the exact opposite. $1,500 is a lot of money. So I just want to make sure I'm not wasting it -- or worse -- getting penalized.
Link Building | | Brand_Psychic0 -
External Followed Links in the Competitive Domain Analysis Report
In the Competitive Domain Analysis report, why does the number of my external followed links vary over time. Some weeks its high some weeks it's low. Doesn't seem to be a pattern.
Link Building | | PGD20110 -
SeoMoz says I have no link, when I know I have. What's going wrong
I know I have backlinks to the site, they are not showing up on SeoMoz. I've only recently started the account. Can anyone help?
Link Building | | jeffshrimpton0 -
Etsy.com --Getting link juice through other pages on search results?
My sister has a store page on etsy.com where she sells home made crafts. And I want to help her rank higher on google with some of the other etsy stores. So i started to look at the other etsy store pages that are ranking well on google and found that they have a page authority between 48 to 52. So i looked at the backlinks of the ones ranking well on google with high page authority and found that many of their best links came from the internal search results page on etsy.com, and some only had one link from just an arbitrary etsy.com search page. I'm thinking this is because another product being listed on the seach page has a high page authority which then passes some of its link juice onto every other product on the page. But what is interesting is products are always being sold or getting added so even though you are on a search results page that happens to benifit from the link juice of another product the next time the page gets crawled you will be on a different search page. So i am thinking in order to maintain high page authority to you just have to have a lot of products listed so that there is a greater likely hood that you will find yourself on the same search page as another high authority page. I have not been doing SEO very long so i would love to hear what others think. I really have no idea, am i on the right track with this? (edited post) Thanks
Link Building | | doug5650 -
Many competitor's backlinks are in content anchor links. Ho do I get these same links?
Hi I managed to open up OSE. I'm finding that much of the competition's backlinks are in content anchor text links. Am I supposed to get backlinks from these same pages using the same anchor text but linking back to my page or is that allowed? If so, how do I get these in content blog post links? Thanks. Sunil.
Link Building | | sunilmuse0