Follow Nofollow

spider, follow, nofollow, robot

[Siler007A]

Hi guys and gals,

I have recently hired a person who provides link building services.

Nearly all of the links are profiles on websites that he has created. They are PR6 and above websites.

I have 3 questions that I would love people to give me thier opinion on.

1) I know how to look for "NOFOLLOW", "FOLLOW" and "robots" in the code. However, most of the sites dont show anything like this or even have a "robot" line in the code. How can I tell if the link created is going to be any good for my SEO. I have added a few links below as examples if that is allowed for people to see what I mean.

2) If there is a "NOFOLLOW" or the equivalent, then the link is useless for SEO, is that correct?

3) The person advertised links from PR6 or above sites. However, they all seem to be just profiles he has created and sometimes my keywords aren't even mentioned in the profile. IS this any good at all?

I hope I haven't wasted my money :-(
<snip>

Thanks

[edited by: goodroi at 12:25 pm (utc) on July 6, 2009]
[edit reason] Please no urls [/edit]

[goodroi]

Pagerank is specific to an individual web page and not an entire site. For example if the homepage is a pr6 and your link appears on a subpage that is a pr0 your link is a pr0 and not a pr6.

If you look at the robots.txt file (www.example.com/robots.txt) you can see if the webmaster is blocking any folders. Some people will block their /resource/ directory to prevent the search engines from ever seeing any link on pages in that directory.

There is debate if a "nofollow" link has any value. I personally think a nofollow link is not necessarily worthless.

From the way you describe the links it makes me think they are not very valuable links.

[Robert Charlton]

For SEO purposes, you can think of a good "nofollow" link as roughly analogous to a Twitter link.

A "nofollow" link from Wikipedia, eg, doesn't convey PageRank, but it could drive a lot of traffic to your site. If enough people saw your site and liked it, some of them might link to you.

In terms of PR flow, that's essentially what a Twitter link does. Whether the Twitter link will drive traffic is another question.

It doesn't sound, though, like the links you've gotten will either drive traffic or give you much helpful link juice. For more on that, take a look at this discussion....

Link Development vs. Traffic Development and Staying with the Times
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