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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:
- No. You shouldn’t disavow No-follow links, as Google says it doesn’t pass any ranking juice to them. [GOOGLE APPROVED]
- 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:
“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?
NO-follow links should not dined. It is working on my site.
Hi,
I am not sure; technically Google says that with the Disavow list they recrawled all these backlinks, so they take out the PageRank / passing link juice of these backlinks, the same that if a backlink is already marked up with nofollow.
If there a is manual penalty, it could help add nofollow backlinks, so you point to the search quality team, that you know, that this is SPAM, helping to get lifted the penalty.
But for the algorithmic, I think there is no positive effect.
we will never know for sure Hans 🙂 unless Google confirms it strongly 🙂
Well, according to my experiments, which i did in last few months, Nofollow Links does pass any link juice directly, but if those Nofollows are from authority sites and are from the body of the post, then it can help in ranking. But still, haven’t able to find the perfect conclusion. So, I think, we should not built nofollow links intentionally, as it cannot help directly to ranking.
I may be wrong. What you think about this?
you will not find a perfect conclusion as reverse engineering does not provide exact results 🙂 back
Thanks Razvan for your reply, at the end I add nofollow links to a disavow file, which i encountered as spam like comments. Regarding Atinder, if a link is trustworthy my opinion is that it does not mind if it is follow or nofollow, when it brings visitors to your site.
HI
Brilliantly Written post.
But, I am still not sure, whether I should go for Nofollow Links or not?
Because some articles say, nofollow links helps in ranking, but some say, it does not have any effect, when it comes to SEO.
So, What should i do? Currently, I am just building dofollow links via guest posting.
Appreciate your time.
I usually don’t disavow Nofollow backlinks because Nofollow tag is used by all general sites which give you backlink that is not related to your website niche, So Google doesn’t give them any attention.
Hummmm, a few weeks ago, I spent 4 hours disavowing tons of spam backlinks to my site. I am confused about whether to go back undo them or not if you are saying it don’t matter. One thing is I noticed my traffic had went down significantly before Google’s new algorithm changed a month ago, so I assumed it had to be spam links. Moz also listed those links as heavy spam sites that were linking to mine..So I am really confused at this point.
I think No follow backlinks should not be Disavowed, because having all the do follow backlinks will tell google that this a black hat seo. I may be wrong.
One of my clients got a penalty for Unnatural inbound links and after updating a disavow file and doing a consideration request Google responded with the 2 example link by saying “Unnatural inbound links persist” and out of that 2 links is no-follow on anchor. What do you suggest I do now?