i have known from one of my friends that dofollow sites aren't really important nowadays? even if it's a nofollow site as long as it's of high quality with high pr and great alexa standing, it's still a good site.. is this true? just curious..
As an answer on your question. Yes your friend is right the Do-follow hence why the Nofollow tag has been removed by the google alghorithm. So therefor you can now just search for high quality and high PR sites to get links from, without checking if the links are do-follow.
Uhhh...reference please? I post on nothing but DF sites and even have a tool on FireFox where I don't have to look in the code anymore - it shows the nofollow links in red. I take this very seriously. Until Matt Cutts (who I really don't care for) or Google themselves say otherwise, I will be sticking only to DF sites.
I have an addon in firefox that tells me about nofollow links (it actually highlight them) and I don't give them any importance and move to next website. But make sure the site you are submitting to is of high quality.. That doesn't mean the PR actually.
If Google has indeed changed their algorithm, this is big news to me. I have been building links that are DoFollow since I first started with internet marketing, and I have been told to do only that. I also have the firefox plugin NoDoFollow 1.1 to show me what links follow and I use it everyday. One of my friends did say that it is still very good to have a link on a high page rank site even if it's no follow. I would love someone to reply to this post and tell us if this is true, wither or not Google changed the algorithm and now accepts no follow the same as follow links.
Like others have said, a reference to this Google algorithm change would a great as this seems like pretty big news.
PageRank, Alexa ranking, and the rel="nofollow" attribute (or the lack thereof) are NOT indicators of a good Web site. It's the content on the Web site that makes or breaks it. If your site's content is written with unique quality relevant content that is highly targeted to your desired audience, you should be fine. Why? Because it's THIS kind of content that gets you the merit-based links that 99.95% of the "experts" here on Digital Point and other forums IGNORE. First, rel="nofollow" is an HTML attribute not a tag. Second, it has NOT been removed. Its usage has been altered. They changed the algorithm about a year ago and didn't tell anybody about it until recently (actually until Matt got called out at a recent conference). As far as rel="nofollow" goes it's really only going to be used for external links that the page author/site owner cannot vouch for and other things like affiliate links.
I've been saying this for over a year: Google Webmaster Tools is displaying over 300 "no follow" links (about 10%) of the 3,163 "External Links" for my site. WHY would almighty Google show these links, and COUNT them, unless they were being used in some way? My theory: Page Rank is affected by the "no follow" tags, but SERP calculations are not affected. The link still is crawled and used for KW relevancy (which goes into SERP algorithm).
The no follow tag is used to stop the flow of page rank however you can still get link relevancy from it and traffic but no page rank will flow threw. So i see how you friend can be right it just depends if he is talking about page rank or other beneficial factors. If google has change their algorithm this mega news but no one will believe you unless you post some PROOF.
Well yes if your target is traffic to your site.. But if you are concerned with backlinks, I think do follow sites are still important because no follow sites do not give backlinks even if you have posted a very meaningful comment to their website.. There are however some sites that I have encountered which provide some backlinks even if they are no follow..
Dofollow bloggers are bloggers that agree to manually moderate their blog comments and remove the nofollow tag. What this means for promoting your Web site is that you should spend your time commenting on dofollow blogs. It is difficult to find dofollow blogs, they are very rare, most blogs are nofollow by default.
Alfons, it's an attribute, not a tag. Tags have opening and closing brackets, like so: <html> Attributes are like "properties" of tags, or modifiers.
Thanks for clearing the difference between 'tags' and 'attributes,' Dan, I'm correcting colleagues all the time about the same exact thing. I figured I'd put my 2 cent in the ring as to the do/no follow debate: Don't worry about it. Who cares, it's not important in the greater scheme of things. If you want your site to rank well make it so that visitors are attracted to it and actually get something out of your site. By creating fresh content that people actually come to see, you'll get those people to link to you and talking (online and off) about your site; your visitors will increase and you'll get more links, obviously. Don't forget social media marketing, it's quite powerful. Oh and it's important not to optimize for just one Search Engine, you wouldn't design a site for just one browser would you?
@Dan: Most people have been using the word 'tag' for "nofollow", it's not even an attribute. It's one of the possible values for rel attribute for anchor tag. It's difficult to say sites where value of anchor tags' rel attribute is set to nofollow all the time and hence people have started calling it nofollow tag. These guys actually know what it means and they are not going to use something like <nofollow></nofollow> anytime.
When I say "nofollow" I mean rel="nofollow" as an attribute/value pair. The shorthand version of that for me is "attribute".