I have realized that a lot of the high PR sites I have linked to add a nofollow tag in their links ... It's becoming kind of confusing . How are we expected to rank our sites if all the sites use no follow ? I'm sometimes wondering if Google does secretly still use nofollow links to rank site because almost all the sites I'm about to link to uses that tag .... Any tips or ideas on finding dofollow sites ? And do you think google still ranks no follow these days ?
Honestly, nobody exactly knows how Google rank websites so it makes no sense chasing do-follow sites for link backs. Even, it makes no sense to check rankings in Google, because everyone sees something different search results. So you better focus on optimization of your website’s pages to make them more user friendly and place banner or content on those websites who actually send targeted traffic towards your websites.
Since social networks can still get you backlinks the amount of backlinks you need from other websites is getting lower. But yes, the amount of nofollow websites is getting higher and most of the Content Management Systems have nofollow on there comments as well. So basically it's all about SMO and linkbuilding (the proper way).
Hi, Content is the way to go. If you look at it from Google's perspective they want you to buy ad space (AdWords) for any commercial site. So they are doing whatever they can to push non-commercial sites to the top of the list (their so called authority sites). So the only way to really rank well is to get Google to think of your site as an authority site, and the way you do that is to make your site an authority site by posting quality content. Of course if you go for long tail keywords that don't have any authority sites ranking for them you can still get good position using traditional techniques. But if someone comes along and goes for that long tail keyword with an authority site, they will get the ranking. So back to the recommendation, lots of quality content.
I could not agree more with the previous responders quality content is the base, you cannot built a tower without a solid base but with the competition these days only having quality content is not enough. You have to push it, there are two ways of pushing it, social media optimisation and search engine optimisation. Social media optimisation (SMO) involves finding relative groups in social media and posting content there with a link to your site, it also involves having a facebook and google plus page for your website and posting relative content there. The ultimate goal to this is user involved with your content and this will produce likes, clicks, people coming to your page, talking about it, linking to it. The second way of pushing you page (both ways are needed) is Search engine optimisation (SEO), that involves creating do-follow links for you page. Dont get dissapointed, you have to obtain do follow links. There are several ways of doing so. 1) do follow blog commenting (in relative blogs) (free) 2) directory inclusions ( these are do-follow and free) 3)web 2 (free) 4) article directories (paid and free) 5) Guest blogging (free) 6) social bookmarks (free and paid) 7) links from .edu sites ( these are considered the most high authority from google) Your problem is that you aim high from the start, of course high authority site are nofollow (there are some dofollow but they are very hard to find). Apart from the above 7 ways of producing do follow links I and many seo experts would not give up on nofollow on highly relative sites because there are websites that your target audience visits, we dont perform seo only for the search engines but for people also. Posting nofollow links there also has an indirect good effect in seo because many interested in the subject will see your posting and give you a dofollow link.
Good point Christos, besides helping with PR and SERP those links will be used by actual people who will follow those links to your site. And that is what it is really all about anyway. Who cares if you have a good SERP if your links are bringing you the traffic you want.
I do not think that search engines do ignore no follow back links completely, and I don't focus much on the type of the back links, as long as the website I am getting back links from are strong and related to my website content.