What is the right percentage of nofollow backlinks?

[serenoo]

Does anybody know what is the right percentage of nofollow backlinks?

Of course I do not expect someone says: 26% or 17%. :)
I need the right range to say to google: hey I am getting natural backlinks.

The only info I read here is that 0% of nofollow backlinks is wrong.

[aristotle]

Google probably has data that shows the average percentage for the web overall, but as far as I know, they haven't made it public. It could also depend on the niche. My impression is that the overall percentage is steadily increasing, because most social networking sites put nofollow tags on outbound links. One idea would be to get as many reputable links as you can and not worry about whether or not thay are nofollow.

[crobb305]

nofollow doesn't sit well with me. I don't use it on my sites, and I see so many people abuse it. I don't sell links, and I link freely to useful resources. However, it bothers me when I see legitimate/trusted sources linking to my sites as a "Useful Resource", but put a "nofollow" on the link. To me it sends a signal that the link is either bought or my site is otherwise "untrusted". This is just my gut feeling but I have no way of knowing how the search engines actually use this tag, other than to simply ignore the link. I certainly hope they don't use it with a threshold that can throw you into a filter.

[TheMadScientist]

The only info I read here is that 0% of nofollow backlinks is wrong.

HUH? You mean we should start asking some sites to nofollow links to ours to help in rankings? Could you point me in the direction of the thread / reference so I can see if there is some data presented to back the thought up or if it's just someone's guess?

With the number of webmasters who don't like nofollow, don't use nofollow, or don't know nofollow even exists I would guess it's a minimal factor (if at all) and definitely not one I would even concern myself with worrying about...

Personally, as a visitor I would hope grammatical correctness, punctuation, and spelling would all have a much higher value than a site having at least one nofollow link... As a visitor I really don't care if a site's got at least one inbound link that's nofollowed or not, but I would like to be able to read what the page says easily in my first language...

If it's really a factor though I can definitely put up a page of nofollowed links to all of my sites from one of them to take care of the issue.

[tedster]

Nofollow is most common on sites that have a major flood of external links that they can't easly monitor - such as lots of UGC, blog comments and so on. Having some of these might be relatively common but I certainly can't imagine it being a requirement or even a peripheral signal.

I just recently did a backlink analysis for a major brand with about 65,000 backlinks. They had just one nofollow in the entire pile, and they have many rankings near the top of the SERPs. If that's any indication (and it isn't) a good percentage would be well under 0.1%

[aristotle]

Some high-traffic sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and Facebook automatically put nofollow tags on all outbound links. In my experience links from these types of sites are still worth having because of the traffic they send. Also, someone who discovers your site from a nofollow link could give you a dofollow link from their own site.

[internetheaven]

The only info I read here is that 0% of nofollow backlinks is wrong.

... and another piece of SEO folklore is born!

Where you read that serenoo?

[serenoo]

Tedster: did you check all the 65,000 backlinks one by one?
Internetheaven: Aristotle said that here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
"A mixture of dofollow and nofollow links. It doesn't look natural if all the links are dofollow. "

[tedster]

did you check all the 65,000 backlinks one by one?

No, I use a paid service that catalogs links along with other key information about their anchor tag.

[aristotle]

Tedster wrote: "I just recently did a backlink analysis for a major brand with about 65,000 backlinks. They had just one nofollow in the entire pile,"

Tedster -- This seems implausible to me. I have one small site that has more than 100 nofollow backlinks out of a total of about 500. I didn't create any of these nofollow links myself. Other people created them on sites like Facebook and Yahoo Amswers. Anyway, it's hard for me to believe that a site with 65,000 backlinks, and the traffic they would send, would only have picked up one nofollow.

[tedster]

It surprised me too, but the the brand is B2B and has no B2C offering. That keeps it out of many of the normal sources of nofollow links.

[aristotle]

Thanks Tedster. I guess it's possible, especially for that type of site.

[tedster]

Truth be told, I expected this brand to have about ten times the number of links than showed up, and they could do with a lot more public mention via blogs and the like. It's just a question of how they might best engage that more widespread audience. If they do it right, then the no-follows will start piling up, I'm sure.

As it stands, they are a perfect counterexample to the idea that a site must have no-followed backlinks to have a natural profile.

[trakkerguy]

they are a perfect counterexample to the idea that a site must have no-followed backlinks to have a natural profile

Yes,it is any interesting example. But isn't it possible they have a lot of trust in Google, so this one signal is overlooked, while another site with less trust might suffer from not having any nofollow links?

[tedster]

Sure, it is possible. As we know, Google analyzes masses of data and they have a good idea idea of what is statistically natural. The algo also balances many factors against each other, including how much end users would expect to see a certain URL in a certain result.

Back in 2006 we had an interesting discussion - Natural vs. Un-natural - in SEO and the Google Algorithm [webmasterworld.com]. It's still worth a read all these years later.

What I don't think is possible is to give rules like "you need x% of this kind of thing".