Tame The Web

This question has been asked many times, and I am now finding myself wondering the same thing.  In an effort to do some linkbuilding for my new sites, I decided to look toward blog commenting as a way to accomplish that.  I do the good old search in google for my keywords, followed by “powered by wordpress”, and come up with a nice list of sites to check out.  Well, I go to a few sites, post a nice comment (related to the site), and submit it.  Then, I check just to see if the link is a “NoFollow” link.  Probably 90% of them are.  Does this make the work wasted?

Some people will say yes, and some will say no.  I personally feel that the “NoFollow” links aren’t a waste of time, as you can still benefit from a few things with them.  The first is the traffic that could be generated from the link.  If you post to a blog that has regular traffic, and somebody sees your comment, then you have a small chance of them visiting your page.  The other main benefit that most people aren’t aware of is that Yahoo doesn’t follow the “NoFollow” rules.  Remember, Google isn’t the only search engine out there.  Yes, you should optimize your page to rank high in Google, but many people still use Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and many other search engines.  These search engines will still count the links to your site, and this means that even those “NoFollow” links will help you.

Here’s the proof, for those who don’t trust everything they read.

This search in Google is to find inbound links for my site ITxTU.info shows the following results.   Results 1 - 6 of 6 linking to itxtu.info.  See for yourself at this link.

The same search in Yahoo showed these results.  Inlinks 1 - 100 of about 260.  The proof is here.

Now, check out both of those links and you’ll see something major.  At Yahoo, a ton of those inbound links come from StumbleUpon, which uses “NoFollow” links for every link off of their pages.  You won’t see any of those links on the Google search.  So, after this discovery, do “NoFollow” links help your site?  Yes, they do.  Not as far as Google’s concerned, but as I said before.  Google’s not the only company that you should be building your sites for.