I’ve decided to do a quick post based on some SEO analysis work I started doing today regarding the very well know No Follow link attribute. Anyone in SEO knows about No Follow and if you don’t you really, really should.
For anyone that doesn’t here’s a very brief summary.
No Follow Links
There was a time where any link on the web passed page rank juice whether it would be on the header, body footer or comment of a webpage. Because of this it did not take long before many SEO peeps were browsing for as many blog with a high page rank and posting their comments alongside their link to get some of that page rank juice passed onto their own sites. This obviously created a huge amount of forced, spammy comments on most blogs that quickly became an admin nightmare for any respectable blog that wanted only relevant comments on their articles. Now, shortly after this chaos, Google announced a new link attribute in which a web master could put on their links to show that they did not trust the link and therefore did not want to pass juice. This attribute was “rel=no follow”
History lesson over and back to the present day. I have just taken on a client’s website in which I am going to perform link building on. I started by analysing the page rank of the homepage which was a page rank 2. I then analysed the links on the page to see how it had got this far already. Looking at the back links to the page there were barely any links at all. Especially any links that would carry a lot of value or any relevancy, except one. This one link was from Wikipedia, this website had a link from the Wikipedia page for the village that it was based in.
From finding this out I immediately went to the Wikipedia page and needless to say it had a “no follow” attribute on the link. Now, in theory this should not pass any page rank at all, but I can guarantee that looking at the other back links this is the only link that could pass on that much juice.
This now raises many questions for me. Has Google axed the no follow attribute? I doubt it. Does Google still pass juice from certain websites? Maybe so, this definitely requires more research from my part and I will be searching many sites to find out the true meaning of the No Follow link as it clearly isn’t as defined as I thought it was.
I have not been posting on my blog a lot lately but I wanted to put this on to see if any fellow SEO peeps had their own opinions or findings on this.
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