I’ve been studying some sites/blogs in niches related to mine in the past few weeks and I’ve noticed an interesting thing about a few pages on a couple of these sites/blogs: 1. They rank really well on Google (1st to 3rd place) for relatively competitive searches, with monthly search volumes between 2000 and 10000. 2. They have hundreds of backlinks pointing at them, but about 99% of them are nofollow links from short, meaningless comments on small blogs. So, I’m starting to think that nofollow links do have some value, especially if they come in large numbers. If this proves to be true, I’m considering going to those exact small blogs and commenting there myself. What do you think?
Yes, they rank very well, so you bring the exposure site, but the authority of your site is not improved
Yes, I do agree! But first start with dofollow and then you can give links on nofollow sites. Nofollow links will give you a link juice value.
I understand that any backlinks will help you site got crawled, but only do-follow will pass you a PR juice.
Personally not bothered if its follow or no follow, a link to our site its great no matter how the search engines deal with it, every link to your site gives you that greater chance somebody will follow one of them and go to your site. All inbound links are great, ok yeah we like the ones which bring in loads of direct traffic more than the ones who only give the odd visitor but hey it all adds up. As for search engines and how they deal with them tho, who really knows. Google say they only take notice of inbound links that are do follow but then can you really belive everything they tell you, Yahoo as far as we know deal with them differently and they are ment to help, but who knows really. There are so many factors involved in serps its hard to tell exactly what works and what dont. All you can really do is build your site to work best it can for the visitors you do get and make sure your offering a great service/infomation to them visitors, then do some promotional work to help the site on its way. But for me a link is a link if its on a relevant site that can provide direct traffic thats whats important, if you get the bonus of it helping you in search engines then great.
I completely agree with Bogs here. Though I am still a newbie, but I too feel that there are several other factors as well apart from backlinks that Search Engines consider for making the sites rank higher. Some other important factors that contribute to a site ranking well are its Content, Neighborhood Sites, Bounce Rate and the average Page rank of the backlinks. Please correct me if the experts here feel that I am wrong.
I tend to ignore follow/nofollow; I'm not convinced search engines heed that command 100% of the time. If a site is valuable, and would be a good place to get a link from, then go for it. You might get some traffic from a site that is a good fit.