No Follow Links

[VillasDiani]

On my campaign report from SEOmoz I have noticed that all my 3 competitors have 99% followed links versus 1% no-followed links. Should I do the same? How can I check were are the no-follow links on my site? I have found some tool online but it shows me that there are only 2 no-follow links on my website which are both www.cloudflare.com while SEOmoz report shows me that I have 1031...where can i view this links?

[TomRayner]

There's no magic number/ratio/percentage for nofollow links.  You shouldn't aim to replicate another website's number of nofollow links specifically, as there'd just be no benefit in doing this.

Focus on earning links in the proper way - by producing quality content and offering a first class service.  You're not going to be seen any more or less trustworthy by Google if you have 1%, 5% or 10% nofollow - it won't make a lick of difference to them.

[VillasDiani]

Hi Tom, Thank you very much for your reply. I just then do not understand why we are not on the first page with our website http://villasdiani.com   and our competition http://dianilife which looks like a spam and when you open it is all broken is there!

[DougRoberts]

Of course percentages can hide a lot of data!  I'm sure you're looking at the volume of links as well as the percentage.

The ratio of followed / no-followed links is just one indicator of how natural the links to the site are.Also in the mix are the authority of linking site, position on the page of the link (footer links vs in content links), site wide links, anchor text (how optimised etc).

Looking at your competitors can give you some great ideas for your outreach, but I would be cautious about trying to replicate everything they're doing.

When you're looking at your competitors link profiles it's a good idea to understand what is natural for your niche. Make sure you don't just look at your 1-3 top competitors, but a broad range of sites.

Here's Tom Anthony's article on Link Profiling:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity

My advice would be to build natural, editorial links where there's a legitimate reason why the link should exist then you can't go far wrong.

You ask how to check where are the no-follow links on your website? Are you looking for no-follow links pointing at your site?

You can do this using open site explorer. Select show "Only nofollowed" from "only external" to "pages on this domain"

If you want to see no-follow links on your own site, linking out to other sites on the web then you can use the SEOmoz tool bar to highlight no-follow links. Depending on the size of your site you might want to use a spider like screaming frog to do this. (You can do an export of all your outlinks - it's under advanced export menu)

Also, you can get a lot more info our of the SEOmoz craw report by downloading the csv file and looking at it in Excel (or your preferred spreadsheet app!)

[VillasDiani]

Thank you Dough for all the info and sunny greetings from Diani beach,  I understated what you mean. And how about the internal links? When I link from one post to the other, the wordpress I am using will create pingbacks which I am deleting, are these also not now follow links? Should I delete them or should I leave them? I am sorry if this is stupid question, it is not easy for a girl to get it all:-(

[DougRoberts]

If you've got internal links between your own articles then leave these as normal followed links.

Make sure your link between your content in a natural and relevant way. Think about how this will help people navigate you site and find the content they're looking for.

These internal links help provide context/relevance to your content and help search engines establish which pages on your site are important.

I had a problem with content being copied off one of my sites and re-posted elsewhere.

The use of internal link between my articles meant that I at least I got some referral traffic from these sites (they had copied my link too) and also got some inbound links.

You'll need to make sure that your internal links contain the full address (www.domain.com/blog/article) and not just a relative path (/blog/article) otherwise they won't link back to your domain.

If it happens to you, you'll want to watch which sites are doing this though - watch out for links from spammy, low-quality neighbourhoods.

Hope this helps.Doug.

[VillasDiani]

Hi Doug, thank you very much for your reply. The thing I am not sure about is that when I link from some of the posts or pages to other posts or pages are no follow or follow. What are the pingbacks which wordpress creates when I link between posts? I normally delete them...should I not? what difference it makes?