Digg recently added nofollow to some links on their site:
We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.
I think this is pretty smart. Digg isn’t adding nofollow to everything, just the links that they’re less sure about. Once a story looks real to them, I can imagine that they would lift the nofollow. I discussed this for Google web properties in a recent video:
Google does something similar with Knol. Initially Knol authors received nofollow’ed links, but as we gain more trust in authors, we can remove those nofollows. As I recently said in another video, if a site like Wikipedia had good confidence in an editor, you could imagine links made by that editor not having the nofollow attribute. So if you have a way to determine which user-generated links are trustworthy, that could be a more nuanced measure of when to use the nofollow attribute. I discussed this subject a bit more in this video in case you’re interested. It’s about 1:24 into the video:
So new move by Digg is a positive change in my opinion, because Digg decreases the benefit for spammy stories but Digg still helps normal and high-quality stories in the search engines.
Well said. It is good that Digg is not putting no follow in all links. I myself do not use Digg, but as a overall nofollow situation, this is a very good move. This will help Digg to receive less submissions that are done only to gain a backlink.
Unlike wikipedia and many other sites who have simply put nofollow in all links including Matt Cutts blog 🙂 How about you too remove nofollow tag from comments by authors who you trust?
I’m just not sure about how they will know to trust a site, and who will put the effort into removing nofollows.
It’s bad enough the “Digg Mafia” runs that site anyway. It’s kind of like the cons running the prison.
Digg was great a few months ago, but I’ve seen a decline in newer sites.
I’ve gotten lots of pages/links from knol trusted and had the nofollow removed, yet some of those same domains have gotten over 300 votes and never frontpaged digg because they aren’t on the digg “white list” (I know you dont know anything about that but yes it exists).
Nofollow has distorted the web into some crazed Dr Moreau twisted and mutated version of what it should be.
Is it safe to say there’s no negative impact of nofollowing all external links on a website? In that case, wouldn’t the limit as time goes to infinity of dofollowed links across the web quickly approach zero?
In other words, I’d expect to see the ratio of nofollowed links to regular links on the web be >1 relatively soon, and quickly approach double digits thereafter.
What impact does that have on Google’s ranking system and the general use of nofollow once the majority of links on the web have a nofollow attribute attached to them?
Wouldn’t that break the way things work?
Just a thought…
So when are you going to permanently nofollow the RipOffReport.com?
On a daily basis, they blatantly abuse every thing under the sun. Today’s violation of Google TOS: paid, hidden links on a German news site called Klegy.de. All you have to do is follow Blogsearch.Google.com and you can monitor it on a daily basis. They have been buying links on Indian and German news sites, so their next stop is probably either Asia or South America. It’s pathetic. Yeah, you eventually catch it, but this is simply replaced with new fresh phony links.
I think it’s nice move by Digg. Didn’t understand how do they decide on which sites they can vouch for?
Would be interesting to see how it effects the SERPS for sites that has lot of links from Digg!!
On the nofollow: Recently I have changed couple of links to “nofollow” for one of my clients site, nothing changed for 3 days but today I noticed that they are ranking well for the main keywords at least moved up 5 or 6 places on the average. Got to see if they can keep the SERPs in the next couple of months.
One of the things was, all the outgoing links that are not relevant to client’s business but client has to have them for business relationship are nofollowed. Links pointing to authoritative sites are left as they are.
Thanks for the post Matt.
Since the whole idea behind the hyperlink matrix was originally about trying to weight links according to how likely a random surfer is to follow… doesn’t that kind of run against the whole idea of nofollow? Random surfers can’t see whether a link is dofollow or nofollow.
If enough webmasters used Google Analytics, a better alternative to nofollow would be weighting links based on how many people *actually click* them. If a link is really spammy, people won’t be clicking it. Contrapositively, if people are clicking it frequently, it’s not spam.
It’s kind of messed up when (in principle) a “nofollow” link from the frontpage of the White House gives less “juice” than 10,000 forum signatures at some dofollow forum.
All of this nofollow/dofollow link issue still make me have a headache.
I think it’s a good move overall, but the profile nofollow is a bummer though. Digg should take into consideration that the loyal users are the ones that make them successful and show some dofollow love for those that are proven and seasoned users. Either way, I personally find their traffic useless, but the links were nice.
Won’t this create an ownership issue since they’re encouraging users to use shortened links that point to framed versions of the content? Digg is basically telling the search engines to not count the direct links to the content, but they’re telling everyone to use digg.com/2736 as a link to the story.
How is this different than any other content scraping site?
I think it’s probably for the best. If Digg did dofollow for every link, it would be abused much, much more. The power of Digg is best retained when possible (to avoid abuse), so this should be a good move forward.
In my opinion, using the nofollow in such a way is furthering the web toward one big paid advertising page. I predict eventually you’ll only find same ol’ already wealthy brands at the top of Google SERP, because they will be the only ones who can afford to buy links “off the record”. I foresee many companies paying digg off the record to be on the follow list.
Matt, don’t you fear Google is creating an inability for ANY website to trust ANY OTHER website they have no control over?
What happens when everyone (who’s wise) errs on the side of caution and nofollows ALL external links? Wikipedia does this and they have excellent rankings in Google.
But what if my measure of “trustworthy” differs from Googles, or what was a “trustworthy” site, becomes a “bad neighborhood” AFTER the fact?
Shouldn’t Google simply decide what is a “trustworthy” site/link, and at worse flow NO link juice, and at best pass links juice? I really don’t see how penalizing/banning a good content site (for simply linking out) has any benefit to anyone?
We’ve been doing this on HubPages.com for a while. We found that as people create content and interact in the community we can get a good idea on the quality of where they link. However, it’s much more difficult to tell on a one off piece of content. So the key is to have the quality score of the content flow to the author and then back to the content. I think it would be interesting to have a way to flow quality information about an author from site to site similar to eBays seller rating.
I think the nofollow link will get more attention in the future. Right now one could argue it’s underused or maybe just largely forgotten.
Perhaps webmasters feel that adding a nofollow will impact on link building somehow. For example, how often has the mantra about building quality links with other sites been repeated, taking an extreme case of everyone using nofollow links, sure it might reduce pointless links and spam but where would this leave link building or PR (or am I missing something). I can see why sites such as wikipedia or Digg and a few others would want to use it but in my view webmasters/designers will be reuctant to use it, or even attach much priority to it’s use.
If this is an automated process, and for sites with popular public access, due to admin it would need to be, how would it work, as in being able to impose a nofollow or remove it depending on “quality” or “trust” ? Maybe I dont fully understand how to auto evaluate these metrics and will that ever be spam proof?
Matt how can you measure a trustworthy site?
I think all “community styled sites” have that problem. I added nofollow to all posted links by default. Another problem is that the content for external links might change after a while, suddenly your site might link to a bad neighborhood!
About Knol, at one site it’s right to use nofollow to outside links… that keeps spammers outside, but how do you motivate authors to write stuff for Knol? What are the benefits? Traffic is so low…
yes to be cheap is modern this days.
*give me your content* make my big and bigger–and if, than I will kill your links.
I hate something like this —
I guess that nofollow isnt nofollow at all.
Some kind of linkjuice will flow.. but not really much.
If nofollow is used as is was meant to used.. like prevent linkspam. Then Google woudnt set links with nofollow because nofollow is something bad in that way. When you set a nofollow link, the websites owner dont trust you, so Google maybe will rate this link negativly
Removing profile dofollow links is not a good idea for growing your user base. Maybe a system where after a certain amount of usage your link becomes ‘dofollow’ would make more sense.
When will the day come when Google discounts external links in their algo, and totally delivers personalized search?
How does Google treat rel=”contact”, rel=”me”, and such?
Matt. Does nofollow links decrease the importance of a PR for a site?
This is the case: Its for a site that doesn’t build links, but the site allow users to share a link with the information on Facebook and Facebook ad a nofollow to this links. Does it will affect the position on Google?
Thanks in advance!
Its a good move by Digg. It will help the trusted stories to gain links. I was about the same question what angilina has asked here “Unlike wikipedia and many other sites who have simply put nofollow in all links including Matt Cutts blog 🙂 How about you too remove nofollow tag from comments by authors who you trust?” 🙂
huh….
it looks like a clear tendecy to me, that applying “no follow” everywhere on the Web is an intended measure to fight seo’s in general… do you think?
It’s got to be a good idea to try to define ‘trust’ but just because something is not “popular” does not mean it is less worthy of trust, just that it’s more niche. Seems to me that more delicacy is required in the definition.
i got confused.
John Quinn says “flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content.”
but “no follow” is updated and if a link has a no follow, it still flows ’search engine juice’ .
any idea?
The wikipedia idea you wrote about is nice. But there will be some bad guys which check for trusted authors and try to buy them for writing or editing an article to get dofollow backlinks from wikipedia.
Its does seem to be if yor face fits one of my acounts got banned after I reported 3-4 of those nutter/scmmers selling run your car on water links in the Auto.
I work for the Largest Audi Deale in the UK so my stories have less trust that some scam artist ?
Also Apple stories seem to do better – so after Leo LaPorts comments re Snow leapoard o wonder if any stories from his domains will make the front page.
Also when are you going on TWIG Matt
Some elements of business and marketing will always be more fun that others. SEO has always fallen into that space for me. It’s like internet chess or Battleship, strategizing and striking as you work your way to the top. With that said, Nofollow always has a way of taking some of the fun out of it. It’s like the kid down the road who always took the game too seriously or just somehow managed to take the joy out of getting together.
Maurice does make a good point; nofollows can be very justified at times. However, it crops up far too many other times when it’s just not needed. Nofollow? Does not play well with others.
Matt,
I’m a bit puzzled on how Google deals with regular links to and from all social networking and tagging sites. Simple example that just came up – some of my computer repair flowcharts (including one from 2003) were picked up a couple days ago by the various tech news sites, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, LifeHacker, etc. Currently, those sites, and a Google News report from Ghacks all rank higher than the source (ahem) in Google for “Computer Repair”. I assume it’s due to all of the “tweet this”, “digg this” and relinks those sites get in the social networking sphere, and maybe it just takes time for Google to flow through rank to the original source, but by that time it probably won’t be worth much because today’s news story is tomorrow’s PageRank=0.
BTW, the main page they link was #1 in Google for “Computer Repair” a few years ago, but slowly fell off the map for that phrase as service directories with massive backlinks from local techs they contract with took over.
Morris
I think Digg is using NoFollow attribute to counter people who keep on submitting all their pages themselves.
Good article –
Nofollow links are more important as the spammers and black hats are using them to optimise their shady ways.
Wonder how many back links will actually exist now?
Nofollow will be used by everyone.
Graywolf has hit the nail on the head….
*Sigh* I am not totally against no-follow. I understand the importance of it, but it truly hurts those people who are trying to be legit. The ‘fight’ against spammers is starting to hurt everyone.
What I laugh at is this statement <q cite="This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.“>
Everything is turning into a popularity contest on the net these days. Much like those rumors that you have to be popular to get on the first page of Google
The fact is, a nofollow link is still better than nothing. Digg can still be used as a bridge page to a spam site. Parasite SEO, anyone?
Digg should have a Google no Follow, no index. Period. It’s gamed. To now throw in no follows tags to certain posts convinces me further. The Mafia pushes a post up and that makes it trustworthy? Hah! I’ve got a bridge to sell to you?!
By adding no-follow to sites who have no credibility, it basically gives even more power to trusted users.
Digg just created a new market for abuse. Websites paying users for 50 Digg.com no-follow links.
Hi Matt
You mention in the second video that nofollow links make up a relatively small % of the links throughout the Web. Have we any idea what % we’re talking about here?
As someone who has been trying to fathom out a Google penalty that we’ve been suffering from for about a year now (I doubt you’ll have seen it yet, but I’ve rather cheekily (and desparately!) tried to lure a response from you at http://www.aardvarkbusiness.net/chat/viewtopic.php?t=20419 😉 ), I’m struggling to work out what else could be wrong with our site and am wondering if we simply need to do more link building.
But link building nowadays seems such a daunting task. The most obvious places where one might have built up links in the past – via directories, forum posts and blog comments – are invariably nofollow these days and I think I’m right in saying it’s often set as default in the directory/forum/blogging software. I’m sure there are lots of creative ways that a webmaster can build links without these channels but it does seem to have become much more of an uphill struggle as webmasters get more and more concerned about the possible Google implications of who they link to.
Thanks
Paul
I’m concerned that nofollow use could makes the web as a whole an easier place to pick up malware, never mind spam.
Consider this: instead of monitoring their links, some webmasters might slap a nofollow on everything. This leads to complacency about the quality of those links, because there are no consequences to linking out to spam, bad neighbourhoods, or virus-ridden dens of iniquity. The links are simply off the graph, so they can’t do any harm to the website that’s linking out, and it maintains its rankings. (Or the webmaster thinks there’s no damage, and either way those bad links won’t get taken down). But such links can still do an awful lot of harm to the uninformed visitor.
Perhaps this is something you’ve already thought of and dealt with in the algo. If not, I hope you give it serious thought.
Ok Matt, You stirred a hornets nest with this post. I just read all the comments and I feel these comments need to be addressed in some way.
There is one thing I need to know. You have almost a half a million backlinks to your blog and you have 35,606 followers on Twitter. According to bit.ly you had 2,952 clicks to this article (as of right now). You must have had more comments, this whole nofollow thing is a mess.
Do you check them all yourself or do you have an assistant help you? I can only manage the responses you get that don’t make it in.
I also second the motion of removing Angilina’s nofollow tag (first post). I would love to her analytics after a week. But…she doesn’t have a link??
Note to self: Don’t ever forget to add url to a comment on a PR 7 Blog. Much can change in a few months
Aren’t we missing the point here? If Digg doesn’t trust the links, why is it putting them (or allowing them to be put) online in the first place?
I think this is a smart move by Digg – good that they are not going to make everything no follow though. Hopefully it will help reduce the number of people abusing Digg with spammy stories and in time boost the overall quality of content submitted
No wonder some of my new digg are nofollow now. I guess it will increase more pagerank in next google update for Digg.
Third-party automobile extended warranties.
The repair costs charged by the dealer, based on a book that indicates that jobs should take far longer than they actually do.
Car salesmen in general.
Dude, you might want to choose something else to compare yourself to if you want to garner sympathy for your cause. I’m just sayin’, is all.
Like I keep tellin’ ya, Matt. The more you post about SEO, the more you confuse the topic. IF you MUST post such topics, I think it’s only fair you address ALL questions about it. And no “Political” type non-responsive answers, pleeeeaaaaaaaaaaase
Don’t get me wrong, I think ALL social media sites, Blogs, Forums etc should either nofollow ALL external links, or, better still, Google should NEVER pass link juice from ANY site where one person (or a gang of them) can self promote their OWN site.
This way, people will add CONTENT to their own site(s) and stop submitting their content elsewhere for link juice.
Not, IMO. I would think all those SEO sites that currently link to Digg will nofollow their links. After all, Digg has more spam that most sites, so why trust them?
By adding no-follow to sites who have no credibility, it basically makes people to know only trusted users and gives even more power to trusted users.
Matt, I wonder whether you’re going to answer at least one of those comments?
These are very interesting questions and you are yet to reply to even one of them… hmmm
Igor
It’s hard enough to rank well, even if you have a 100% legitimate site with unique and interesting content. Nofollow seems to be spreading like a disease and more and more popular websites and blogs are using it in fear of the allmighty Google which you so much adore.
Will it even be possible to index a website in a few years from now? What’s the point of creating good content if nobody reads it. Submitting sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t seem to help much, and an occasional link from some forum just doesn’t cut it.
I’m usually submitting links to digg which of course helps my pages and articles get indexed and even ranking, but there’s rarely any visitors coming from digg no matter how unique, interesting or good the submitted link is. And just because nobody diggs the story doesn’t mean you submitted spam.
Established sites with huge number of visitors keep getting their stories digged, therefore getting more and more readers. The rest is just left out.
Is trying to spread the word about your website really that evil?
I just try to play by the rules and work hard at promoting and optimizing my website. I am not trying to get people to click links on my site for pennies – just trying to be found when someone searches for our services. Pretty much ignore the nofollow issue.
Good move from digg .. its prevent him to stop spam submissions but at least they should keep dofollow on profile links… webmaster still can use digg for traffic generation.
Like the Google police all over again – no hard and fast rules! and they probably end up with thousands of untrained college kids moderating posts? I hate it that these guys get their sites hugely popular and then they turn their backs on us. Goodbye Digg!
Hello Matt, thanks for bringing this to light.
One question – how do you view using “nofollow” to prevent indexing duplicated content on same site (e.g forum thread of posts vs. single post – you can view them through two urls, but they share same content). In past we have marked single post with nofollow. Can you give some recommendation, because we don’t want to lose link juice under current Google algorithm?
Nofollow links on web directories or Social Link sharing tools is not a good strategy !
In this way, they will be higher ranked than the targetted website 🙁
Personnaly, I dislike social links building strategy !
I can understand why Knol would follow that strategy – it’s proper content and they are looking for authority authors to do respectable Knols. But, Digg? Comon! I really don’t think it will help them in any way apart from adding more work fro themselves
Matt,
BTW, I tried using some NOFOLLOW links on my site to the order pages for books, just as an experiment, since those pages aren’t expected to get search traffic on their own. What strikes me as interesting is that the PageRank of those order pages went to zero, even though I didn’t NOFOLLOW all of the links, just some of them. Does Google “get the idea” from a handful of internal NOFOLLOW links?
Morris
Seeing as Matt has stirred up more confusion and refuses to define “trustworthy”, or what happens when a “good site” becomes a “bad neighborhood” AFTER being linked to. My advise, from this point on, will be to nofollow ALL external links. It is simply NOT worth the risk any longer. Does anyone else see this nofollow attribute coming back to bite Google on the Arse?
I doubt this move by Digg will see a large-to-medium drop in spam by SEO/Spammers. SEO who spam are too stupid to care. They also do this as a means to increase traffic to their clients sites. Clients are too stupid to know Social Media traffic is serious JUNK TRAFFIC.
MATT, FEEL FREE TO CORRECT ME ON ANYTHING I HAVE SAID THAT IS WRONG.
thats really disappoining, is it follow available for old users?
I hope this will remove some of the spam. At one point digg became full of spam from webmasters.
In other hand this may decrease their popularity.
Thank you very much for acknowledge us. This is very interesting cause i know before that every social networking site works on “nofollow”, even wikipedia also.
If digg or other similar site paying more values in terms of “dofollow” link in high quality articles, This is very good for creative author who just write articles for popularity not for spamming links .
People are focusing more time on what they should and should not do in SEO, and less time on quality content.
I hear ya on that, Chris. Matt is forcing people to worry (become confused) more about Google (and other SEs) than their human visitors.
I don’t use digg a lot but I would say this was a smart move on their part.
Hey Matt,
I will be slightly off-topic as I want to point out an issue regarding Google’s SERPs usability. When you search a name for instance – query1, odds are Google will ask you “Did you mean query2“. Often it gets it right; I’ve spelled the name incorrectly. But often, that’s exactly what I meant. The problem is, Google will show me the results for query2, not for my query1. Wouldn’t it be nice if users could press a button or link such as “No, I meant query1” and in response, Google to show the results for query1?
Example
Thanks.
How do your promote your main business website (which is less likely to have new content generated) and thus promote interest and authority status? Do we all need to have blogs for our offline business to produce new, trust based content? We’re in the martial arts industry so more time working on this takes us away from makes us a true authority.
Who would want to manage the no follow links program?
Wonder what the actual mechanism to do it is.
RM
Wow, Matt, the HD quality from YouTube you are using is very fast and a VERY impressive quality, (looks better than Dailymotion or Vimeo).
I know you are a busy guy, but if you have a second… What camera are you using, and are there any special settings we should know?
The whole idea of a nofollow link is flawed. I link is a link is a vote. Now if folks are abusing that, then Google needs to try and detect it somehow and allow no juice or penalize.
RM
Yea no follow links are great! That way you don’t get any link juice and you can pay Google .39 at as time to get visitors. The whole no-follow attribute has been taken to the extreme and anyone who links to anything is using no-follow.
Yes. I think no follow on links they are not sure is smart and helpful to their visitors. No one want to link to the bad sites.
It is possible that some link juice is still passed from Digg onto a site, even with the NoFollow? I heard that Google might still look at some Digg links this way. Is there any validity to this?
Well said!!!Nofollow links are more important as the spammers and black hats are using them to optimise their shady ways!
@Paul: Matt actually answered that question in his question-answering for bloggers. (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/) He basically said that no, Google respects the nofollow.
Hi Matt,
Just i want to know that, is social bookmarking good for a site?
Is it increase traffic?
Matt….adding no-follow to all posts in Digg will substantially reduces backlinks for a website…..Same is the case with Wikipedia…What is your opinion for the nofollow for the Yahoo Answers where hundreds of questions relating to the same topic will be asked there.Wont Google consider it as a spam !!!
Interesting move for Digg. I agree with you that this is pretty smart move for Digg. They are being selective and not just adding nofollow links to everything.
I had no idea that Google does similar things with Knol. You just gave me something to research and read more about.
Keep ’em coming! 🙂
Wow. Not to side track you away from this Digg post but I had no idea that Google Knol has been out and about since July 2008. Google sure is quiet about launching some of their applications. Interest way to compete with Wikipedia eventhough Google does not openly come out and say it is.
Matt: I know you’ve tons of comments to read on your blogs but if you get a chance, I’d love to see a different blog entry just about this addressing some of my questions below.
After reading more about Knol, Will it have the effect it will have on SERP domination?
How well will these articles rank?
Is Google planning on mining these data in future?
The question is what are they going to do once they attribute you, the author, as an authoritative source on a particular subject matter.
I have a question – how is a site supposed to legitimately get discovered if it can’t be seen?
Sites like digg served to help unknown sites get into the index and thus through ideals they could get recognized and have people appredicate and cite their content. But now with more turning to nofollow, smaller content is not getting acknowledged – it can’t get the credit it deserves because no one is able to find it in the first place. Sites like digg treat these sites as if they are spam because they simply have never heard of the site.
I’m sad to say your logic fails to account for this – assuming that content creator doesn’t spam their link to people via email or through other blogs gratuitously they really can’t be discovered. So really this sorta action encourages people to spam their website wherever they can so they can get recognized, the people with the knowledge and spammers will still find ways around it – but the small time content producer is the one who’s really getting penalized.
I know this isn’t your fault, and it’s a larger problem but just wondering whether you guys and gals over at webspam have really thought about this and how you intend to remedy or at least look into it.
I agree with MK Primas, that there needs to be some thought about how smaller content creators (like me) can let people know what they’re doing.
For example, I was told that Digg start adding nofollows if an individual repeatedly promotes content from one site.
I completely understand why this is in as it stops the spammers, but then how can I let people know about my content. Having only just started the site and with relatively few visitors, it’s unlikely that many people will find me naturally or Digg me.
It seems like a bit of a vicious circle that will only benefit larger already established sites.
I found that after making no follow Google gives some importance to the no follow link of digg. Is it right?
I think rel=”nofollow” is no sense
If you link a site,this site is relevant for you
If for you is a shit of site, please dont link it
If you are Digg and you have authomatic link, your content is shit because you dont selected it. Digg deserves to be punished cause of bad content, bad links,
Nofollow make Digg not be punished by Google
Is it safe to say there’s no negative impact of nofollowing all external links on a website? In that case, wouldn’t the limit as time goes to infinity of dofollowed links across the web quickly approach zero?
In other words, I’d expect to see the ratio of nofollowed links to regular links on the web be >1 relatively soon, and quickly approach double digits thereafter.
What impact does that have on Google’s ranking system and the general use of nofollow once the majority of links on the web have a nofollow attribute attached to them?
My hindi song lyrics site http://lyricswale.com does not have nofollow, does is it going to effect my page rank, as it has been reduced from 4 to 1 in just 8 months.
Please advise
Just a thought…