Yesterday I read a very good article on Problogger which looked at 10 tips for a flawless link strategy. There’s some great ideas in there for anyone looking to strengthen their website’s reputation in Google.
But… It did lead me to ask the question; does a perfect link profile look too natural?
The above quote may be true, but in this case I prefer this one: “A beautiful thing is never perfect.”
Obviously everyone wants to aim to do everything perfectly, but the reality is that as close as you might get, you probably still won’t consider it to be perfect. If you think of this from an SEO perspective, even if you’re number one in Google for all of your top ten target keywords – why aren’t you number 2 and 3 as well? What about the other keywords? Where are you in Yahoo? Etc… There’s always room for improvement.
The same applies for link building – a link profile is never complete, it’s always a work in progress – even if you dominate market share in your industry, there’s always that bit more you can do.
But thinking about how link profiles are built up, something you might think is the perfect link profile, Google may consider to be unnatural. So in theory, building high-quality links which boost your website’s credibility, should help to build Google’s trust in you – and let’s face it, it’s not a bad start! But if you’re competing at the top end of Google for competitive keywords and you’re looking for that extra 2% or so to push you forward, perhaps the fact that you have very few nofollow links will appear unnatural to Google and could be the difference between being first and second or third.
Let’s have a quick look at how some UK brands backlink profiles using Open Site Explorer. Clearly these sites will have had at least some sort of link building activity (maybe even Google?!), but I’m basing this on the fact that they are well known brands who should naturally attract links.
So firstly, lets look at Boots which has 8% of its links nofollowed:
Next, it’s Next – with 7% of links nofollowed:
John Lewis has a lower figure, but this still accounts for 2% of their backlinks:
And finally Google UK (who knew they were comment spammers?!) have 7% of all links nofollowed:
So if we agree that all of these sites have strong backlink profiles, which help them to rank highly – perhaps it’s safe to assume that a perfect link profile will not just consist of SEO perfect links.
What do you think? Would this change your link building activity? Do you ignore building all nofollow links, or would you still look to build them anyway?
If everyone would just build websites with lots of great content and give readers a reason to return then links will build naturally.
I must admit that I have never believed all the hype about nofollow links. I link from anywhere if it is relevant.
I believe in building links naturally over time, through great content, and a great site, but also linking to things that are relevant and trusted, will certainly help your efforts.
Condomized links are easy to collect. Therefore I’m chasing those, before just another webmaster figures out that the engines give a dead rat’s ass about anything put in REL.
I completely agree with what Nick is saying.
A website has its own purpose and should provide visitors/customers with high quality content. If a website has this high quality content then individuals will naturally link to it and create a “broad” link profile. A perfect “seo link profile” is far too “fake” and will not provide a complete overall brand image.
The problem with only building “natural” links is that while you might be all clean and pretty the guy ranking above you is working it, down and dirty. Asking for some links from friends and guest blogs is a “natural” way to help yourself.
Building links whether follow or no follow are all going to lead to increased natural traffic which ultimately is the name of the game. If there are additional benefits from higher search engine ranking then all well and good
Building naturally doesn’t mean that you are sitting and waiting Dave, you are still working it even though you aren’t going the down and dirty way. Yes Guest Blogging is a great natural way too..asking for links from friends is fine as long as they are good quality and relevant to your site.
i agree with debbie above…and based off many, many hours of reading link portfolios and studying the “linkscapes” i find the tools reporting nofollow links…on the same note, why not get some image-embed links too? diversify your portfolio for optimal results…
I also think that when your content is valuable you could have more qualitative links which are valuable and this will come naturally.
I have always told my clients to grab all the links they can get, regardless if its do follow or no follow. I have read a couple of articles and experiments where it has been found that Google still notices the no follow links and still gives you some credit for them. You also never know when you may post a no follow link and someone may visit you site through it, love your content and give you a natural link on their site.
Do not bring bad unfollow link to your webpages, it may spoil your image. Only lloding for link that is related.
I believe you want everything about your optimization too look natural. To do that you need a full array of links without trying to focus only on the “SEO” ones.
I am sure about the following:
a) The anchor text of your no-follows will be taken into consideration,
this helps getting indexed for keywords, and for rankings of the specific keyowrds.
b)The no follows will not pass link juice, but they will pass also trust in my opinion. A no-follow link from wikipedia will not mean anything for your site status?
No-follows are still a benefit. Backlinks can’t do harm, only help. So get them wherever you can :)