Links to Social Media accounts, rel=nofollow/follow and rel=me

[DmitriiK]

Hi guys,

I just saw this rel="me" attribute and I can't find any reputable recent (within last year) information. I never heard of this and wonder if it's any beneficial in any way.

At the same time, should I use nofollow or follow on links from website to social accounts? I've heard different opinions but, again, no recent relevant and trustworthy information.

Please, kick me into right direction. However, when kicking, please give me some proof, rather than thoughts

Thanks!

[DirkC]

Basically nofollow links should be used for

• links to site with untrusted content
• paid links

You could use nofollow as well for crawl prioritisation (not leading Google bot to pages on your site that can't or shouldn't be indexed like loginpages) -although this is not the recommended usage (according to Google: "a solid information architecture is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links".

Source: Google

For links to Facebook you have the choice - a big chunk is not being indexed by Google (source: https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt?_rdr=p) - so you could put the links nofollow (but you could leave them follow as well). For the other ones - it could be interesting to have links to your Instagram / Twitter account to push these as well. 
I would just keep all these links follow. It will certainly not hurt you.

Dirk

[DmitriiK]

Thanks.

What about too many follow links from the same website?

Example: as a webdesign company we have a backlink from every client's footer. So, we used to have them all follow, therefore from large ecommerce websites we were getting 10k+ follow links. We decided to try to do all those links nofollow. Pretty much next week we saw significant enough jump in rankings.

There are lots of articles/discussions about topical relevance of follow interlinked websites as well.

What's your take on this?

[DirkC]

You might be interested by this article from Marie Haynes on footer links (follow or not follow) which gives a recap of the (sometimes conflicting) statements from Google regarding footer links- and some advice on how to deal with it.
It's a pretty long article - but worthwhile reading; Marie is also member of Moz & specialised in link penalties & unnatural links.

Dirk

[DmitriiK]

Thanks! I'll look into it tomorrow.

[DmitriiK]

Good article, but as you said, statements sometimes conflicting and self-contradicting. I guess the best way is to test and see what works and what doesn't.

[DmitriiK]

Now, what's about rel="me"?

Anybody has any insight?

[Ria_]

I'd recommend linking to all your own properties using rel="me". You can see the tag in common usage on Twitter and Instagram  profiles, where the user's website link is tagged using rel="me". You can basically connect up all your online properties as belonging to the same person/brand/entity - and who wouldn't want that. You're indicating to Google that all those webpages are related to you. By linking to your social profiles from your website using rel="me", you're confirming that those profiles are officially yours.