The Ever Developing Mystery of No-Follow Links

No Follow links have consistently been one the most debated topics in the SEO blogosphere for some time.  While not nearly as volatile a topic as paid links or social networking link sharing, this is a debate worth bringing to the table.  To most SEOs no follow links such as comment posts or Digg/Reddit posts possess no value to traditional optimization.  However, this has been called into question as one can clearly see that some no follow links are indexed through Google Webmaster Tools and that comment sections are easily one of the favorite targets of spammers and some black hats.  As this blog has long maintained, SEO is a field where items that do not produce results are quickly dispatched and replaced with other techniques that drive home the utility of the service to site owners.  Employing this thinking leads the SEO to conclue that these rampant uses of no follow links must derive some value to the linked website.  The dangerous conclusion is thinking this value is PageRank. 

As with all SEO questions, there is really no definitive answer as to whether no follow links pass some juice or none at all.  Some claim they pass none, while others say there is some ‘juice’ being passed along.  The consensus appears to be that the link value they pass along is near nothing.  So you’d probably be better served getting one link from a PR5 website in a month, than getting out 40,000 comment links (approximately) back to your site.  When numbers like that are pointed at your face it is pretty clear that no follow links are a huge waste of time and should in no way be a part of a traditional SEO campaign.  That said, there is some value to a no follow link but only if applied correctly.

Since no follow links are so easy to accumulate there is some intrinsic value in just the overall ease of obtaining them.  That value lies not so much in passing along PageRank for organic ranking purposes but in a few other aspects of internet marketing.  Since we have seen that these types of links can be indexed it means they are being spidered so if we have a new site which we are hoping to get indexed early and often, this is a useful tactic.  Another implication is that these links, if posted correctly on sites such as Quora, will actually drive traffic to the website just by being seen by the community.  As such there certainly is a place for no follow links in SEO campaigns.  Just use your time wisely and soon you’ll be wealthy enough for some of these.