I like blog commenting as a link building strategy. If you can add to the conversation, it’s an easy way to get both human visitors and backlinks.
But what about “nofollow?”
Nofollow is often ignored. Last year, Ben Fisher did a case study to see if nofollow links counted - they certainly seemed to, based on his results. Neil Patel “broke” the story with screenshots, and that post is now recognized as the “nofollow is BS” authority.
Because I recommend tools like CommentHut and Comment Sniper (which server 2 very different purposes when trying to get traffic from blog commenting), I often get emails from folks asking about the “nofollow” issue - why comment on blogs if it’s nofollow, blah blah blah. So it’s clear there’s still some confusion within the population on the value, if any, of nofollow links.
I thought I’d run the same study as Ben did last year and see if I could get my site to rank for a keyword that (1) is not on my site and (2) only use blog comments to get anchor text links for my keyword. I, like Ben, chose a misspelling simply because I’d be able to see results very quickly that way.
The term: ultilevel marketing
The results as of 5:44pm PST on 2/18/2008 after leaving about 15 blog comments with the help of Comment Hut to find relevant blogs are that I am ranked #1 for the keyphrase in Google, Yahoo and MSN:
What does this mean?
- Nofollow links with well chosen anchor text can pass link juice
- Blog commenting on nofollow blogs is still an effective way to increase search engine rank for a term
- Thoughtful and interesting blog comments will always bring human visitors
Some 30 Minute Backlinks users have noted that occasionally, software directories nofollow their links. Clearly, based on the results above, nofollow links *do* still contribute value to a site’s rank in all three major search engines. Any links that happen to be nofollow received by way of 30 Minute Backlinks continue to add to a site’s overall link profile and ability to rank for it’s keyphrase.
Edit 2/22/08 to correct my misspelling of the misspelling
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The more I read about the nofollow principles, the more confused I become due to the conflicting stories. I do a fair amount of writing for third parties where the nofollow attribute is an absolute no-no.
It’s not surprising new net folks get confused. Who are they to believe if they’re not techie minded and don’t understand the workings of nofollow or dofollow attributes.
I know this is a bit off topic but, for some reason my name seems to get hits in Google searches than my site. I recently started putting my website link in name fields as I did here. Is this an effective way to comment?
also, I’m still a little fuzzy on exactly what a no follow link is? Is it link that is now inactive? I’m not certain.
Thanks!
Michelle,
You seem to be writing quite a bit about MLM these days. Is there something we should know? …are you planning on “coming out of the closet” about your real opinion about multilevel marketing? :0)
ahhhhhhh tooo much to doo :-(,
I just getting overwhelmed with this internet markeing, just cant seem to get out of the newbie tag
Hey Michelle,
This is totally out of left field but when is the music mastermind coming out? Do you have any dates? I’m really looking forward to it.
Thanks.
Michelle,
I just wanted to tell ya a couple of things. Your pdf “Social Media Daily” was a really good read and full of great info.Also, great blog… good info and down to earth…
I’m getting ready to launch a site that you might really like, so maybe when I’m ready for a few beta-testers, you might be interested.
I know you’ll give me your real opinion as a beta-tester and not bullshit me, etc. Anyways, let me know if your interested. Thanks again for the great info. TTYL
Jason Counts
JasonCounts.Com
Michelle, I’m probably being dense here, but what the hell are you talking about in this post? Did you post comments on 15 no-follow blogs? Did you use the misspelling in your signature links on those comments? So you rank #1 for the misspelling, right? And the conclusion is: that wouldn’t happen if no-follow wasn’t followed?
One more thought on this, Michelle… If Goog interprets nofollow as _don’t score this link_ as opposed to _don’t follow this link_, then it would seem that your test resulted in a #1 position because of the number of links for the misspelling, rather than for pagerank, i.e. no juice flowed…
Do you think “no-follow” links count less than a regular link?
So basically you would need 5 “no-follow” links to equal the value of one regular link.
That would be an interesting test too.
So are you saying then it’s a waste of time, time that could be better spent elsewhere, to play with the dofollow plugin?
Hello Michelle,
Great Posting again.
I also think that even nofollow links would help achieving better rankings.
But i also think that your little case study doesn´t tell much because of this seldom searched keyword.
@ “easy wealth fire” - you’d be better off using keywords instead of your URL.
@ John Thomas - I’m never opposed to an additional income stream, but no, no big MLM secrets to reveal.
@Eric - I’m having a hard time with Musician’s Mastermind because I’ve found that most musician’s don’t care to learn the nitty gritty details of online promotion. They hate marketing and balk at anything technical. So I’m not certain where that’s going. Perhaps I’ll email the list and get some feedback.
@John M - Nofollow is followed, that’s established. The test was to see if nofollow links could still cause a site to rank for a keyword - they’re not supposed to. But it seems they do.
A word on Page Rank - stop chasing the little green bar!
@ SEO - I would think they count “less” then a regular link. But I think that’d be near impossible to test, sine you’d have to link from different domains, each would have different “strenghts” in Googe, you wouldn’t know which link actually caused the rank. Too many variables.
@ Sandra - Getting links from places that “nofollow” is not a waste of time.
@Shopping - the point wasn’t to rank for a massive keyword. The point was to see if it was at all possible to rank for a term with only nofollow links. If I’d chosen “weight loss” or some other such competitive term, I’d never see the results, because it’s difficult to rank for with even hundreds of legit dofollow links. I wasn’t trying to put a year of my life into this, LOL, just a quick experiment.
Great bit of detective work, Michelle. From what I understand, “nofollow” means just that, so either one or more sites in your test didn’t use the nofollow rule correctly or Google is ignoring it for some reason. Some of the comments on here hint that it’s the misspelling that is causing this; however, that would just mean that one of the blogs you commented on should be number one and not your site.
Running this test on a non competitive phrase is not going to be an accurate snapshot of the overall picture here.
Google ranks sites differently based on how popular the search term is. To make a complex story short, Google makes it harder to rank for keywords (or phrases) that carry a PPC cost of $.50 or higher. The higher the cost, the harder to rank.
The higher you have to bid on a term on the PPC side the harder it is to rank for that keyword organically. The algorithm shifts based on the real dollar value of the keyword. Google’s PPC system does talk to the organic ranking algorithm.
This has been verified by myself, Jerry West and Russell Wright.
On keywords with no activity Google will rank you at the top just because you are fresh and new. It probably had nothing to do with no-follow links passing link love.
It would be interesting to see this study conducted on a competitive phrase to be able to better assess the theory.
- Charles Heflin
SEO20/20
I would be interested to hear experiments using nofollow tags on yuor internal pages to preserve juice and increase page rank and rankings
There were a few videos from Stompernet about a month or so ago that showed how to use nofollow tags on your internal pages.
Frank Bruno
http://videomarketingtactics.com/
@Charles - Keywords with little activity are, of course easier to rank for.
The point wasn’t “Look, I got a #1 rank with 15 blog comments” (because that’s silly, it’s a useless keyphrase with no competition and even less searches) but rather “Look, a site can get into Google results for a keyphrase with nothing but nofollow links.”
It’s not an issue of competitive phrases, that’s entirely not the point here. I didn’t rank for the phrase, then I linked to my site with the phrase on nofollow blogs and then I ranked. This isn’t meant to say you can rank for whatever competitive term by using blog comments, it’s meant to say that nofollow links still do contribute to one’s site rank and are a worthwhile strategy (in addition to one’s overall link building strategy).
@Frank - I use nofollow on my salespages - i.e. SocialMediaDaily.com has links to “TOS” etc. that are nofollow. According to this test, those pages will still pass some value, but I do believe nofollow links are “credited” as less valuable in the SE’s eyes. They certainly aren’t ignored, based on my and Ben Fishers testing.
Hey Michelle,
I want to learn the nitty gritty of online promotion. I’m a musician with a business mindset. Is there anyway if those retarted musician who don’t like marketing(seeing that when your an indie artist marketing is what will make you successful duh) don’t want your information that you will sell it on a individual basis? I would LOVE to have the information that you provide, actually your information is one of my marketing plans to promote my music. Pretty please I trust you, I brought tubeinator and it was wonderful. I know you know your stuff when it comes to online promotion.
I’ve read something that slightly agrees with you.
Spiders CAN read nofollow links but they wont pass PR through them.
What do you think about that?
Hi Michelle, Great post and a very interesting test. Can the results be skewed because the search term is 1.)very unique and 2.) mentioned in your blog post. We know that Google index’s and spider’s Blogs on a more regular basis than regular sites that are not updated on a regular basis. For Example I ranked #1 for the phrase “meanwhile in the bat cave” which was the title of my last post. There was no commenting from me using that phrase at all. Just curious, what are your thoughts on this. By the way, I don’t comment just on blogs or posts that have the dofollow as I truly think that is not what the spirit of community and socializing is all about.
Michelle,
You said you used Comment Hut to find the 15 blogs to comment on. I thought Comment Hut only offers up blogs that DON’T have the “no-follow” tags.
@Eric - thanks, will keep that in mind!
@James, yes, they can read nofollow, they follow nofollow, and they still “count” nofollow links towards your sites overall link profile. Whether they pass PR or not is impossible to know, it would require a site get nothing but nofollow links for 3-6 months. Regardless, PR is not important.
@Earning - (1) No (2) no, the terms wasn’t on the blog before I made the post, and it ranked before the post. There doesn’t NEED to be links to a site with a keyphrase as anchor text for that site to rank for the keyphrase, it helps though.
@Beth - No, CommentHut finds blogs about a keyword and doesn’t look into follow/nofollow. They’ve tested as well and found it irrelevant. Read more about their findings at http://www.commenthut/michelle/
Hi Michelle,
Us SEO’s have never been happy with the idea of the “nofollow”, since the number of crawl-throughs has historically been thought of as Popularity-influencer. The algorithm as we know it, is Relevancy + Popularity = High Ranking.
That being said, nofollow has never been associated with “noindex”. Link text and the URL associated with that link text have never had anything to do with whether a bot should or should not crawl through the link (and both are absolutely recorded by the crawlers, even if not followed).
Point 2: Toolbars
Google claims that it doesn’t use the toolbar to track where you’re surfing: http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?answer=32820&topic=11750. However, we know better than that. Several us have created isolated, non-linked pages and have visited those pages with an active toolbar, only to find the page indexed in a matter of weeks.
Even though a link might not be crawled, it’s still indexed, and recorded in the search engine’s database. When Googlebot or Slurp do evaluate the website, it matches the URL with the link text previously recorded and if the keyword-optimized content correlates with the link text recorded - BAAM! You have ranking.
Great post - I’m in total agreement.
Nice analysis. I wrote recently about the effect of “No follow” and how people have overblown its impact. Do read about it at my blog.
“Busting the common rel=”nofollow” Myth! - and a Few Other Tips.”
There’s a lot of confusion about the topic of “no follow.”
Here’s the short version of what rel=”nofollow” is (according to Wikipedia) and why this has zero effect on your use of any of the tools that Michelle has
mentioned in her post…
“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s
index.”
The main point in that sentence is…
“used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s”
When assessing any of these types of tools, be aware of any sites that promise you any of the following results:
A. Influence your link target’s ranking in the search engines.
B. Influence your link target’s page ranking in the search engines.
The reason why I say this is simply because nobody knows what the search engines use to produce such results. Irrespective of any tests that any individuals
may have ran, nobody can guarantee you better search engine placement, or better page rank, by simply placing comments on blogs.
However, having said that, here’s the contradiction…
Just by commenting on relevant blogs, I too have had great results in terms of better rankings and better page rank, but can I guarantee that it will happen
over and over, no. Can I guarantee that it will happen to you, again the answer is a resounding no!
It’s the main reason why we’ve never promoted this fact and stood by and watched while others have made the topic look sexy on the outside, but on the inside
the story kind of stinks. Quoting what the search engines will do, is a very thin line to walk indeed.
So in short…
Yes it has happened to many people that they too have received better seacrh engine placement and better page rank, but because we, as mere mortals have no
clue what the big three search engines have in mind, it’s questionable to use that as selling point…
Having said all of that, what these tools can do for you, guaranteed is the following:
1. Save you time by automating your searches for related blogs to post your comments on.
2. Sorts the results you find in order of page rank. A typical search could return results ranging from page rank 1 -7… (depending on your chosen niche).
3. When you read and leave value adding comments plus your backlink on blogs, search engine spiders will pick them up, follow them and index your site(s).
In other words, these types of tools are great for getting your sites indexed quickly and easily.
4. In addition, real human beings read your posts and if you’ve written something of value, they will click on your link. Which means they are also F.R.E.E
targeted traffic generating tools.
5. Puts you in a great position of being able to contact and form relationships with the owners of blogs that you find IN YOUR NICHE… Which means, if used
correctly, you have a powerful networking tool in your hands also.
So now that you’re all clued up on the topic of no follow and you have an idea of what the tools Michelle has shown you can do, go give ‘em a try out.
Stewart Alexander
Another conclusion could be: when ranking for small competition keywords use nofollow links and when ranking for heavy competition keywords this is not enough, you will need the algorithm as we know it, links with relevancy + popularity for high ranking.
How about the links on this blog Michelle? Are they nofollow?
gr,
Remco
@Remco - I use the Wordpress “dofollow” plugin, so comments are not “nofollowed.”
This is good stuff! It is always helpful to have theories such as those mentioned here backed up by the evidence of hard testing as opposed to hearsay.
In answer to the question what is nofollow, it is an instruction for spiders not to follow any links mentioned within the tag. The purpose could be either to try and stop spiders wasting their time crawling stuff you are not interested in having indexed, or more likely an attempt to control the flow of link juice. It has been widely believed that Yahoo ignored them anyway, but if Google still indexes them, then they are not as worrisome as previously thought.
Charlie
The test is invalid, because you show the evidence screenshots of the search term ‘ultilevel markeTING’ instead ‘ultilevel markeITNG’.
This is a useless experiment, but it is an excellent link-bait article to get lots of links!
Based on my observations over many keyword sets, I would tend to agree with Snel. If the keyword has little or no competition, you can win with nofollow - after all, Google wants to serve something up every time there is a search. I also think it’s a good idea to include no follows in your linking anyways since it looks more natural - even if their worth is questionable on competitive keywords.
Ah, my bad - I mispelled the miss-spelling in the post. The correct term is “ultilevel marketing.” Test was on that term, blame my typing!
Another conclusion would be; when ranking for small competition keywords you can use the nofollow links they will count also and when ranking for heavy competition keywords you will need links according to the algorithm as we know it; relevancy and popularity for high ranking.
Hello Michelle,
Great Posting
I’m sure that you’re wright, but the links with nofollow counts less then links with dofollow.
Hey Michelle,
Can I use 30 min backlinks to promote my music?
Nice experiment. Also thanks for the suggestion about using CommentHut!
Don’t you think the test you performed with “ultilevel marketing” is just a ‘low hanging fruit’ case?
There’s no competition for the word, and it never gets any searches online.
Just wondering.
Great blog too.
well far out…thats interesting that nofollow appears to be still counting…im going to check this out myself…i wonder if it counts but isnt seen as a link out by the blog…in turn being ok for both sites with pr etc…
if thats true about the nofollow then i wonder why they set it up like that…maybe nofollow used to work but now the search engines changed there mind…
I have noticed the inclusion of ‘no follow’ links within the list of back-links shown on Google webmaster tools & Yahoo site explorer. Could it be that the search engines are occasionally ‘ignoring’ the nofollow attribute or the bots dont always pick this attribute up when crawling/indexing?
It seems that some people are missing the point of this test. Yes, it is an obscure keyword phrase that would be easy to rank for. That is irrelevant. It was chosen for ease of testing and seeing the results.
-The key part to focus on was that the keyword phrase was not on the page that got ranked. It was only on the pages that were linking back to her page. Since it was her paged that ranked and not the ones that actually had the keyword phrase on them, the backlinks from those sites had to be the factor in her page getting ranked for that phrase. Also, keep in mind that since the keyword was not on her page it wasn’t that the links were followed by the spiders, but that the search engines gave her page credit based solely on the backlinks.
-This isn’t an article on how to rank #1 in Google using only nofollow links. Nor is it to prove how much value the nofollow backlinks have, just that they do have some value. The idea to take away from this is that nofollow backlinks aren’t the complete waste of time that many people believe them to be.
The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.
i think it helps indexing
I don’t think the issue is black and white. It’s not “Do nofollow links count”. Yes, every link counts. BUT, it’s a matter of how much they count (which someone said above). I think the experiment needs to get a little more precise. Perhaps run on 5 different sites with various numbers of backlinks. I would like to know if the ratio is like 10 nofollow = 1 dofollow or more like 100 nofollow = 1 dofollow..
That would make a big difference. Yes?
You know we have been using blog comments as one of the ways for backlink generation for our clients. I have often wondered the effectiveness of the nofollow link. Thanks for doing this test study, now I know that it is not all in vain. While I do still expect nofollow to not pass as much juice, its great to see its not a total loss!
It’s great to see some proof that nofollow links do count.. After spending a load of time link building in the early days just to be told that most blogs are no follow and most of my time was wasted!
I had been looking for some information on this. There is so much debate on this topic and whether it is helpful or not. To me, it seems like too much work for sites do not count these even if they are not followed. Good post.
All links have value! Even if only to a useful topic relevant resource elsewhere. I would think that search engines place importance on important links and less importance on less important links. No real mystery here!
If nofollow does not contribute to your PR it would still offer links to your site. The issue is, how much time are you willing to spend to gain site importance with little reward? Every link counts but some links make bigger steps forward than others.
hey hey hey! It means that nofollow link still can bring rank to the linked site? Then,why we use nofollow link?
I am so confused.
Thanks for the post on nofollow.
I figured they had some sort of validity.
I guess doing whatever you can sure helps!
Michelle,
I too thought commenthut is for no-follow tags but in any case do you put your kw where name is PLUS also an anchor text when you comment or is that overkill? I think it’s true for low competition phrases that the results would be good but not for high.
Deb
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