The one thing that always makes me crack up is this whole thing of PageRank vs. “linkjuice”. I’ll tell you why…
One time I read, and I’m paraphrasing…
“Do-follow links pass PageRank AND linkjuice. No-follow links pass linkjuice but not PageRank.”
I kid you not.
How would a person possibly know this unless they were working for Google? And this person was NOT working for Google.
But better yet, it’s quite obvious what the difference between PageRank and linkjuice is… NOTHING.
I mean come on, is there really two types of linking forces that thrust you up in the rankings? And one of those is called linkjuice (that’s a technical term)?
It’s like a funny old wives’ tail.
If there was a differentiation, it would be that PageRank is the measurement and linkjuice is when PR flows as a result of that measurement…?
What?!
But anyway… if you’re passing linkjuice, you’re passing PR.
So how does no-follow and do-follow play in?
Well, it’s said above that no-follow does not pass PageRank… that’s an interesting concept. Matt Cutts has said that they links do pass PageRank. I’m not sure what his current statement is. His words tend to lead to a lot of confusion. Much of it is must be “engineered” for a certain cloaking effect.
But Ryan Deiss, talking in his PTF pre-launch content said, “A link is a link is a link.” He’s not the first one to say this. He’s not actually the authority I would listen to, even though he’s selling a $2000 course on SEO right now. I’m just mentioning him because his launch is recent news and he’s not near the first one to say this.
And even though I tend to agree with them… how do you know? Have they gotten websites to rank for competitive terms with only no-follow links? Has anybody attempted and succeeded at that?
But you know…this is how no-follow made it’s way into Google…
It is widely conjectured that linking from your site to “bad neighborhoods” or sites that Google considers malicious, can ruin your rankings. So Google created the no-follow tag so webmasters could protect their public use websites from links that would hurt the ranking of their site.
And does that now make those links irrelevant?
I don’t think so… my Digg links seem to be pretty effective in getting my pages indexed…
So the link can’t be invalidated by no-follow, per se.
But unless somebody has gotten to top 3 of a competitive term with just no-follow links, I’m going to have to say two things…
1) I’m 60/40 – 60% for they do pass PR, 40% for they don’t
2) Why bother with no-follow links at all? It’s so easy to get a do-follow link, that it doesn’t make sense to take the chance! It doesn’t take you more time or cost you more money. Just find backlink services who promise you do-follow links… how hard is that?
This bolded part is my main point of the article. Who cares about whether or not PR and LJ are the same… or whether no-follow passes either one?
There is currently no dispute that a do-follow link passes both, whether or not they’re the same. So just get do-follow links when you’re paying for them or working to get them.
Seems pretty simple to me.
