Blog Comments & nofollow to follow backlink ratio
-
Hello
I have a website with 2000 nofollow links backlinks and about 20 follow links. It is currently ranking 11<sup>th</sup> on Google. The websites that are outranking it have lower ranking stats and in some cases only 2 follow links.
Most of the nofollow links are blog comments, could this be what is dragging down my stats.
The only factor my website is worst on is the number of server requests per load, which is 194 as it is a theme.
Blog comments can be very difficult to remove; I created these several years ago before I knew too much about SEO. Most of them are on other websites in same niche.
Would I be best to ask website owners to delete my comments or restart on a new domain.
Thanks
Rob
-
Hi Rob,
The general rule of thumb is don't worry (too much) about no-follow links, although there are times to also ignore this as well.
Key factors that will be making a difference, are the content and the do-follow links. You can't just look at the back-links as the reason why you aren't ranking well.
Without seeing them, I would be tempted to just not worry about the no-followed links, and concentrate on:
- Making sure the do-follow links are of good quality and don't fall into the spammy category, and
- Look at your content and how good it is - does it match up to the competition?
It never hurts to do some competition analysis to see how your competitors are beating you.
-Andy
-
While Penguin changed a lot of things about links hurting you, nothing that I have seen anywhere has suggested that nofollowed links are harmful. Google gives these safe harbor, more or less. The only exception would be if you were spamming and get reported as such.
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
-
Sitemap For Static Content And Blog
We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site. We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year). But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently. How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed. I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones? I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
Panda Cleanup - Removing Old Blog Posts, Let Them 404 or 301 to Main Blog Page?
tl;dr... Removing old blog posts that may be affected by Panda, should we let them 404 or 301 to the Blog? We have been managing a corporate blog since 2011. The content is OK but we've recently hired a new blogger who is doing an outstanding job, creating content that is very useful to site visitors and is just on a higher level than what we've had previously. The old posts mostly have no comments and don't get much user engagement. I know Google recommends creating great new content rather than removing old content due to Panda concerns but I'm confident we're doing the former and I still want to purge the old stuff that's not doing anyone any good. So let's just pretend we're being dinged by Panda for having a large amount of content that doesn't get much user engagement (not sure if that's actually the case, rankings remain good though we have been passed on a couple key rankings recently). I've gone through Analytics and noted any blog posts that have generated at least 1 lead or had at least 20 unique visits all time. I think that's a pretty low barrier and everything else really can be safely removed. So for the remaining posts (I'm guessing there are hundreds of them but haven't compiled the specific list yet), should we just let them 404 or do we 301 redirect them to the main blog page? The underlying question is, if our primary purpose is cleaning things up for Panda specifically, does placing a 301 make sense or would Google see those "low quality" pages being redirected to a new place and pass on some of that "low quality" signal to the new page? Is it better for that content just to go away completely (404)?
Technical SEO | | eBoost-Consulting0 -
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Existing content & 301 redirects
Hi All, I will try to keep this to the point. One of our websites was hit by penguin for unnatural linking. We are building a new site (same business, different domain), but we would like to take some of the pages/content off the old website and use it on our new site. Is it just a case of copying each page onto our new site and 301 redirect the old URL? Or should I just be completely rewording/recreating the old content so it is unique? Any help on this would be great, but I am also open to alternate methods too. Thanks Lewis
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
How should we setup of a side (slightly off-topic) blog?
Our web application targets small business owners and entrepreneurs. However, the developers at our company have a lot of great content to offer the web development community and so we want to start a "behind the scenes" blog where we can discuss technical topics... JavaScript performance, web accessibility, etc. Our customers and the visitors of our website would probably not be interested this new content... So we want to be careful not to cannibalize or damage our current SEO. What are some of the major risks we should watch out for? If we put it on a subdomain, is that enough to not impact our main site SEO or introduce keyword confusion? Conversely, are there opportunities for this side blog to help the SEO and authority of our main website/domain? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | Bill4Time0 -
Guest Blog Posts and PR
Let's say I do a guest blog post on a PR5 site. Let's also say the post is deep within the site, and the page rank that flows to it is only maybe PR1 or 2. Let's also say it doesn't get many links to it so it forever stays that way. Will Google realize even though the PR of that page is low, it's on a PR5 site, thus giving it more link power than it the overall site were a PR2 site? Did that make any sense?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Can I reduce link count by no following links?
Hi, A large number of my pages contain over 100 links. This is due to a large drop down navigation which is on every page. To reduce my link count could I just no follow these navigation links or would I have to remove the navigation completely?
Technical SEO | | moesian0 -
Redirecting blog.<mydomain>.com to www.<mydomain>.com\blog</mydomain></mydomain>
This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions. I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here). As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server. How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain> I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers. Thanks. Mark
Technical SEO | | MarkWill0