Hi Everyone.. Wanted to ask a question to some of the members here. Ive been reading a lot lately about the importance of having a balance between nofollow links and dofollow links as google and other engines are clamping down on sites that have only dofollow links pointing at them, is this just rubbish or is there some truth in this??? Thank You Danny
I think it's a part of the equation that Google uses to work out if your site is behaving well or not. It could never be as clear cut as 'have too many dofollow links = get penalised' though, because otherwise we'd all be buying dofollow links to our competitors to get them penalised! Basically you want to keep your link profile as natural looking as possible - a fairly even mixture of dofollow/nofollow, varied anchor texts, varied sources and link building methodologies. Ideally you'll focus on making your site popular and just getting natural links anyway - then Google would have no cause but to love you!
As far as my knowledge related to Google there isn't nothing such rule till now i.e., maintaining balance between no follow and do follow. However its good give a reference to those links which you may find useful while writing down an article(this is stated by known google expert matt cutts too)
Thanks for the reply's, i have been link building with both as im sure that if your backlinks just show up as dofollow then it must look very unnatural .. 1 more thing we keep seeing lists of dofollow blogs sites etc showing up from time to time here and in some other forums, now these sites must get hammered with comments in the 1000's in a very short space of time. my question is does google and other engines take note of this?
Never worry about appearing "natural". There's no "natural" link building velocity or balance of dofollow and nofollow. What a nofollow link tells Google is that the link could have been placed by the webmaster so it shouldn't be trusted as editorial. A site that relies on whitehat / link bait / stuff like that might not have any nofollow links and that looks more natural than anything. As for your last question, all backlinks on a page kind of share the outgoing link juice. If there's 10 links, you're sharing with 10 sites. 100, 100 sites. The more these blogs get hammered the less the links are worth. So the search engines aren't actually taking note, but the natural process just makes them less beneficial.
Sorry but I totally disagree with this. Your assumption of what a nofollow link tells Google is flawed because it is based purely on what Google wanted the nofollow link to be used for in the first place. However it's implementation is completely different. A huge number of web sites use the nofollow attribute incorrectly, take for example a blog. The original intent was for webmasters to use the nofollow on the comment links because they were not editorial... but blogmasters went a step further and started implementing the nofollow on all links throughout the post, these ARE editorial links but they still have the nofollow. Similar can be said of many news sites and web2.0 sites. A site that relies on whitehat / link bait / etc will never have 100% dofollow links, it is completely unnatural even if it is completely whitehat. It just doesn't happen, every web site will get a nofollow link whether they want it or not.
Maybe everyone will get a few, but there's no reason to believe there's a metric that compares the ratio of nofollow to dofollow.
Ergo, the opposite is also true, there is no reason to beleive that there isn't a metric. Without proof (which niether of us have because we don't work for Google) there is no way that I can say there is 100% a metric for this and there is no way that you can say 100% that there isn't.