Will No Follow Links count toward your root domain links for Domain Authority?
-
I am wondering if no follow links help, hurt, or do nothing when it comes to increasing page and domain authority?
I know they are not supposed to pass rank and I have read discussions that some people suspect they still might, but I am wondering if I have a mix of follow plus no follow, will the no follow ones increase the count of the root domains linking to me and help boost my authority?
Assuming of course the no follow links are coming from quality sites with high page and domain authority of their own.
Thanks.
-
Does anyone know if Mark and Barry's answers still hold true (nearly 1 year later)?
We have a disproportionate amount of NoFollowed Linking Root Domains and I'm worried that it's having a negative effect on our rankings.
Thanks!
Eric
-
A lot of what Mark said, but it definitely depends where it's coming from.
A big part of the social web has nofollow links in profiles (quite correctly as they can't control what people are linking to), but I'm pretty sure the big search engines are looking at SM sites in order to determine part of a domains authority.
Nofollows don't hurt and there is always the advertising value of them. Though if these are editorial links it's got to be worth talking to the site owners to see if you can get the nofollow removed.
-
Awesome Mark,
Thanks for responding so quickly. I am off to get some no follow links to diversify my link portfolio
-
No follow links certainly don't hurt! Whilst they may not pass on any direct PR, they can still attract REAL click through traffic (maybe even REAL customers!) especially if the nofollow links are coming from related "quality sites with high page and domain authority of their own." - If these sites which feature your no follow links are indeed quality then they will attract traffic as a result - if your no follow links are present amongst the quality information on these sites it stands to reason that you can only benefit from those links.
No follows links also help to create LINK DIVERSITY which will improve appearance of any link building method you use - as it is expected that a number of your inbound links will be no follow links.
There are some who suspect that Google MAY take no follow links into consideration despite their clear statements to the contrary.
So in summary, if you can get no follow links from quality sites you should certainly do so as they will NOT harm your DA or ranking - at worst they would be neutral in this regard - but still pass additional traffic your way.
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
-
Gained a number of new 'do-follow' links - Good or Bad?
So, my client's site is on a subdomain of the parent site and there were a number of links previously pointing to the subdomain site from the main site which were all no-follow so were purely for referral/traffic benefits. Around the end of February, the main site changed all the links to 'do-follow'. Is this likely to have caused the decline we've recently seen in organic traffic to the site and a drop in rankings? I'm curious as to how that could have affected the site as we didn't know and have only just found out about it but I'm not sure how to show that it's led to a decline. Any help is appreciated!
Link Building | | soapmed1 -
Domain Authority and Fixing the site
Ok, so let's say I have a page on my site that says "Find a Personal Injury Lawyer Boston" Obviously that is very competitive and it is hard to get links for. However somewhere else on my site I have an article that says "10 mistakes to avoid when making a will." In theory, if I can get links to the "Making a Will Page", that increases the domain authority of my entire site, and boosts the likelihood of ranking for "Find a personal injury lawyer Boston." Is this correct? Let me know and thanks for your help!
Link Building | | RafeTLouis0 -
One page hit with 10K no follow spam links, should we disavow?
Hi everyone, I'd like your opinions on the best way to handle this situation: One particular site page just got hit with 10,000 no follow spammy backlinks over 10 days time. I've read that it's pointless to use the disavow tool on no follow links (since it basically does the same thing) but we want Google to be aware that this WAS NOT US and we don't want to be penalized for these spammy links. Couple of questions: 1. Do we send backlink removal requests to each domain webmaster? 2. Should we skip removal requests and move right to disavow? 3. Should we take other action? As a site we have NEVER used any black hat SEO tactics over a 15 year history and have many HQ do follow and no follow links to the site and this particular page. Thanks for any suggestions in advance!!
Link Building | | geteducated0 -
What is the difference between external followed links and internal followed links.
I have almost 3,000 external links followed and only a tiny amount of internal followed links. My website is doing really badly on google at the mo. I am also an SEO beginner and learning new stuff every day, but am not sure exactly what the difference is! Thanks!
Link Building | | heleni0 -
Links built by previous SEO company are mostly 'dead' - will this affect me?
Hi, This is my first post/question in the forum - so apologies if this topic has already been covered - or if the question seems daft! Here's the issue: I have started working on two websites, and have been doing a lot of on-site work, increasing valuable content, etc... I'm now slowly moving onto more off-site stuff and have noticed that a lot of the backlinks to both websites (built by SEO companies before I got here) are 'dead' and simply return 404 errors (yet they still show up in site explorer). I'll be honest, the links aren't great; the SEO companies have taken the word 'relevant' and completely re-defined it in their books! Will these links - from sites that aren't relevant... but are dead - have any impact on my SEO efforts from now on? Or should I treat these sites as a kind of 'clean slate' and work on building the brand naturally through social media and user experience, etc? Also - I'm re-structuring the internal pages of the site... would it be worth re-directing the old URLs (with all the dead in-bound links - that may have suffered a -50 penalty) to the new ones, or just start fresh with the new pages? Any advice, tips or stories to share (relevant ones, of course!) will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Nick
Link Building | | Danapollo1 -
Links from erotic domains
hi.. I have purchased several domains which have had a lot of backlinks.. a lot of these backlinks are still active but mainly from pornsites.. do those backlinks affect the websites i links to from the domain? fx. lets say i have the domain abc.com which has a link from sex.com.. Now i want to link from abc.com to def.com - will the link from sex.com affect def.com in any way?
Link Building | | AdForce10 -
Where to link?
Hi I need to gert this page up in the rankings http://www.kerryblu.co.uk/wedding-headbands-70-c.asp but am getting no where fast. When applying for links should I direct them to this page or to the homepage, and let them filter through. Thanks
Link Building | | Yorkie0 -
Is there a tool that looks at an existing domain and scores how spammy its link graph is?
We are building a report for a customer and want to do an independent analysis of the domain to see if it is sketchy. Where sketchy is defined by artificial content, link building activity, etc?
Link Building | | greg360