Is do-follow / nofollow ratio important?

[PaulEchere]

A buddy of mine suggested, that people should keep an eye at the do-follow / nofollow ratio of of your backlinks. For me that didn't make an awful lot of sense as in the end of the day you aren't really in control of who links to your site and how they decide to do it.
Though anyone might have some experience based opinion on this.

[ramonavega]

You can’t get organic traffic from Google if you lack any of these do-follow or no-follow links types. They’re both important for the long-term success of your site.

The most essential thing to keep in mind, though, is that you need a balance on the type of links you get. On one hand, if all your links are only dofollow, Google and other search engines will view this as manipulative and tag your links as spammy, even if you didn’t do anything fishy.

[Michael Martinez]

Google doesn't care about "nofollow" links. They are ignored. You'd have to rack up (maybe 10s of) thousands of them before the spam team took an interest in them.

[Nocturnalant]

Google doesn't care about "nofollow" links. They are ignored. You'd have to rack up (maybe 10s of) thousands of them before the spam team took an interest in them.

In reality they are not ignored.

[chaumi]

Google doesn't care about "nofollow" links. They are ignored. You'd have to rack up (maybe 10s of) thousands of them before the spam team took an interest in them.

......which renders the ratio unimportant right Michael?

But the underlying sentiment that Google will expect to see both is still there, and it may (probably will) be seen as unnatural if the balance is skewed out of line with however they've set it in the algorithm (assuming that's where it's set).

That said (and if correct) then trying to engineer it is (near) impossible, given you can't control all the rubbish scraper links that appear (other than waste time disavowing)

All of which (I think) makes the answer to Paul's original question (or at least the sentiment behind it).....

Yes it's important to have a mixture (but no one knows what that mixture should be, except for someone who has been penalized in this sphere, and there may have been other reasons at play so you couldn't fully trust it anyway)
You will probably pick up no follow links 'naturally'
So if you're building links then it makes sense still to try to get 'follow' but be aware that too many (without any nofollows gained as well) might well send a 'bad' signal

I'm going to make a 'bold' prediction though.....

within a year this will all be irrelevant (to an extent, and there will be a number of exceptions) because Google will have found a way to stop this utter links madness (which of course had it's place) but for years now has had it's day (for multiple reasons, not least the sentiment behind this whole discussion - and most discussions around links!

[chaumi]

In reality they are not ignored.

Although that may well be right, I'll bet you don't really know that for sure...or have any real idea of how right or wrong that statement is

[Michael Martinez]

Google doesn't care about ratios of "follow" to "nofollow". They don't care about the "nofollow" links because the whole point of that attribute is to remove the links from their link graph.

Nofollow is disavow in reverse, and disavow is nofollow in reverse.

They ARE ignored as far as passing any value or determining page quality is concerned. If the spam team takes an interest in a large backlink profile based on, say, 10s of thousands of blog comment links (all using "nofollow" or not), whatever happens because of that interest isn't implemented by an algorithm.

The algorithms don't compute any kind of balance. That's an SEO myth that came from a highly speculative person whose ideas have been discredited time and again.

[gil.langelaan]

I would say that of course do-follow links are much better than no-follow. But still no-follow links are important too as it makes you backlink profile more natural. So according to my practice: 70/30 will be the best option.

[TheGooner]

For me that didn't make an awful lot of sense as in the end of the day you aren't really in control of who links to your site and how they decide to do it.

That is EXACTLY how I see it as well Paul - I can't control links to me - so I waste no time monitoring, counting or worrying about it.

However, I know there are a lot of webmasters that obsess over this on a daily / weekly basis - possibly because they are artificially creating backlinks and want it to appear normal?

[CasinosJungle]

That is EXACTLY how I see it as well Paul - I can't control links to me - so I waste no time monitoring, counting or worrying about it.

However, I know there are a lot of webmasters that obsess over this on a daily / weekly basis - possibly because they are artificially creating backlinks and want it to appear normal?

This is interesting to read everyone's thoughts about ratios, thanks for posting. I had read somewhere around 8-10% no-follow links looks good to google (but as discussed above this number could be arbitrary) But as you guys said it's only a point of concern if the site links aren't natural in the first place. A mix is healthy anyway since you can still get traffic to the site and build brand awareness and user trust, it just comes without the juice.

[PROFRBcom]

In reality they are not ignored.

Although that may well be right, I'll bet you don't really know that for sure...or have any real idea of how right or wrong that statement is

I have experimented with it and I am 99% sure that nofollow links can, and do count for ranking purposes, under certain circumstances.

[Randy Ray]

A buddy of mine suggested, that people should keep an eye at the do-follow / nofollow ratio of of your backlinks. For me that didn't make an awful lot of sense as in the end of the day you aren't really in control of who links to your site and how they decide to do it.
Though anyone might have some experience based opinion on this.

You're right. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense, and your reasoning is spot on. You have far more important things to worry about if you're running a website, anyway.

[popopdc]

I wouldn’t worry about it with respect to links you are not creating/can’t control, because as you said, what’s the point? But if you are working on building backlinks, just make sure that the ratio of links has a “natural” profile with respect to do-follow/no-follow and other attributes.

[artrust99]

I have experimented with it and I am 99% sure that nofollow links can, and do count for ranking purposes, under certain circumstances.

Same here. Nofollow link from very respectful website brought a positive movement in serp for my article.

Also, I would add, that if you clear spammy backlinks from time-time, it will also give good impact.

[sattakings12]

yes it is very important in seo the ratio of dofollow & nofollow is 80-20%

[petimi]

I would say the "ratio" is not important. In my experience, if you can get a nofollow link from a site that has relevant traffic and good reputation/authority it will have positive impact on your rankings, even if it's not dofollow.

Personally, I ranked a brand new domain before only building nofollow links. So are these links really not counted towards ranking? I think they are.

[universal4]

yes it is very important in seo the ratio of dofollow & nofollow is 80-20%

Who defined that percentage?

Was it one person guessing?
Was it 4 people guessing?
Was it defined by a handful people that posted actual research at the larger seo forums?
Did any of the research, "or guesses" actually include data from the gambling industry?

Rick
Universal4

[Michael Martinez]

It's a bogus ratio based on a series of flawed assumptions. No one outside of Google has the ability to determine which links pass value. Google admitted some time ago they might crawl links marked as "nofollow" and a couple of years ago they decided they would ignore the "nofollow" attribute at their convenience.

So all these assumptions about ratios are just nonsense. They don't have any relevance to how Google's algorithms work. It's just really hard to get people to let go of ideas they've embraced for years even when confronted with contradictory facts - and that's not a dig at anyone participating in this discussion. It's a principle of basic human behavior - it applies to me just as much as it applies to anyone else on the planet.

In this case, however, the facts have always been aligned against the idea that nofollow links somehow help or affect rankings. They don't - not in any sense of a "ratio".

[hcasinos]

I have to agree with you there. Sites can rank with nofollow links as well. Obviously not for very competitive keywords.

[Casinomentor]

Regard!
I have never heard of any document from google talking about this ratio