You own a website (or you are working on behalf of someone who does). When you try to increase the number of links to your website with the aim of lifting its ranking in the serps, do you bother about the difference between ‘no-follow’ and ‘do-follow’ links?
This question matters, because on the surface Google claim to take no notice of ‘no-follow’ links when they are developing the algorithms which produce their listings. Their spiders, they say, do not follow ‘no-follow’ links, and therefore such links do not exist when it comes to producing pages of serps.
When Google look at your site, they say, they will follow only those links which are clear of ‘no-follow’ tags (for ease of reference, we call these ‘do-follow’ links) They then weigh the influence of such sites according to different factors. Is the linked site itself a popular one, thus capable of generating lots of traffic? Is it less popular but authoritative, generating less traffic but from people more likely to use it seriously? Is it a ‘commercial’ site, or an ‘informational’ site – the difference between a site trying to sell books, and a site giving scholarly discussions of books’ qualities?
If this is an accurate description of Google’s approach, you might deduce it is not worth having links to your site from any other site, however worthy, which only deals in ‘no-follow’ links. Do not actively seek out such links. Get rid of them if they do appear.
However, there are two important arguments against coming to this conclusion.
The first argument is intuitive, derived from impressions. The ‘on-line’ world is not so very different from the ‘off-line’ world. We all know ‘off-line’ people to whom every acquaintance seems to rank as a close friend. We suspect them because we do not know what their motives might be. Are they genuine, or are they trying to sell us something, or somehow to con us? Their ‘friendship profile’ does not feel ‘natural’. Somehow, in addition, you do not entirely trust the people they call their friends. Are they on the ‘friends of a friend’ list because they are genuine, or because they are rich or powerful, or what?
This is how the ‘on-line’ world works as well. Google looks at every site’s ‘links profile’ – and if they find your site has not a single ‘no-follow’ link, your site looks ‘unnatural’ to them: consequently, they suspect your site’s motives. It looks as if you are manipulating it, and Google may therefore downgrade it accordingly. Thus, you achieve the opposite of what you intended.
If you are indeed manipulating your site’s ‘links profile’ in order to improve its rankings, you must still contrive a way of making it look ‘natural’ in terms of its ‘links profile’: so you need to include believable proportions of ‘no-follow’ and ‘do-follow’ links.
The second argument is empirical, derived from experience. Try an experiment: spend a quarter of an hour Googling random search terms – as random as your imagination allows, from ‘aardvark’ to ‘zuegma’. It is almost impossible to find a Google listing where Wikipedia does not make an appearance somewhere in the first ten results.
If you get a link from the BBC (and theirs are ‘do-follow’ links), it will count for a lot in Google’s algorithms, the site being both popular and authoritative. Everyone knows the BBC in general and everyone trusts it, the world over. No-one suspects its motives: if it ever does try to sell something, it will only be one of its own programmes.
The longer Wikipedia goes on, the more authoritative it is becoming. It may contain inaccuracies (but then, so may the BBC) but they will hopefully be accidental mistakes rather than deliberate deceptions. Most people know of it now, and most people increasingly trust it. Wikipedia’s editorial processes may seem over-zealous compared to the early days; but it follows increasingly from this that people believe in its reliability.
And yet… and yet: Wikipedia only allows ‘no-follow’ links in their pages. However much they claim otherwise, Google must be following these links. If this is true for Wikipedia, you would be foolish to think it is not happening for other sites too.
A Wikipedia link to your website is starting to look like a BBC link: worth its weight in gold, ‘no-follow’ link or not.
The conclusion must be that the difference between ‘no-follow’ and ‘do-follow’ links is not worth bothering about. So far as you can, let the mix happen naturally – or make it look as if it does.
