After our unnatural link detection launch last week, a lot of people asked if they should disavow NO-FOLLOW links.

The short answer is that there is no exact answer on this.

There are 2 major, contradictory, opinions on this:

  1. No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [GOOGLE APPROVED]
  2. Yes. You should disavow No-follow links as they might be created using unnatural methods and they could add up in the unnatural link mix.

1. Why shouldn’t I disavow No-follow links?

First of all there is an official Google representative that confirmed this. His name is John Muller and he is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland.

Here is what John has to say about it:


And here is the definition of the No-follow link from Google’s General Guidelines:

 “No-follow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

 Important Note: If you use the unnatural link detection in cognitive, in order to filter out the No-follow links you should just apply the No-Follow filter and work only on the Do-Follow links segment.

2. Why should I consider disavowing No-follow links?

Nothing confirmed here … only some rants …

1. No-follow links are possibly transferring ranking juice in certain cases and there are also, some studies that prove that.

2.Google doesn’t always say the “correct” things. Negative SEO has been working for years, but the Google Guidelines denied it vehemently. Google changed their wording, a while ago, in order to reflect the possibility of someone else ability to affect your rankings.

3. What about “link building” campaigns that dilute the signals of naturalness using no-follow link acquisition.

I bet you are confused now. The question still remains:

Should I disavow No-follow Links? 

The safe’s bet, would be  to follow Google’s Approved tip and disavow only do-follow links. If a domain is sending both do-follow and no-follow unnatural links, just ask for a full domain disavow there.

People have reported successful recovery stories on both the cases so I think you aren’t risking anything.

 

What’s your opinion on this “confusing” subject?

 

 

 

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