Video
Abstract
Webmaster-Videos
Optionen- Selection
0:00Let's talk a little bit about nofollow. Here's a few questions we got. Vince Samios from the UK asks: “Do you feel that all the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google's search algorithms?”
0:14So let me just interject before I finish the question. Even though SEOs may feel like nofollow is everywhere on the web. If you look at the percentage of links that have nofollow, it's actually a pretty minuscule percentage. So nofollows aren't that common on the web compared to how the perception of them might be.
0:30So let me finish the question now: “Examples such as Wikipedia, where all external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google's algorithms?”. And then jonaths from Brighton, UK asks: “Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from well established authority sites, such as Wikipedia?”.
0:50So we're not trusting, we're not taking into account the links from Wikipedia because they are nofollowed. So if you, don't bother to go spamming Wikipedia. It's not going to make any difference in searchengine rankings, if you get a link because that will be nofollowed.
1:04If you have a great resource and people find it via Wikipedia and it's just fantastic and people link to that because of that or you're getting traffic from a link in terms of direct surfers or visitors then that might benefit your site but it's not going to get any searchengine ranking-boost just because Wikipedia links to you with those nofollow links.
1:24Now let me take a, one slight detour and mention that if a particular site does have trust in the person who is making the link, then there's plenty of good reasons to make that link flow PageRank and take the nofollow off.
1:38So, for example, Wikipedia has experimented with all kinds of different ways to improve their process, you know, maybe anonymous edits have to be approved before they go live. So you could certainly imagine a scenario in which a Wikipedia editor who is very trusted, who had made a ton of edits without them ever being reverted, you know, that other editors vouched for. However they wanted to define trust. Those links might for example take the nofollow off.
2:02So a very simple thing, when you are being under attack from spammers is to add that nofollow tag and then it doesn't benefit the spammers anymore. But if you run a blog or forum or Wikipedia or whatever and you can come up with a good metric to say “Okay, these are links that we do trust, that we do think are editorially given and are valuable for users”, then there's plenty of good reasons to go ahead and say “Okay, make those links flow PageRank”.
2:24But in general, nofollow links are a relatively small percentage of the web and it does prevent a lot of sites from getting spammed. We don't use those links from Wikipedia currently but if Wikipedia wanted to put a more nuanced policy in place, I would definitely support that.