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Just recently I was running a competitive analysis for one of my clients when I noticed something kind of strange. I had seen a site that passed my clients site (and a few other major companies) for a very, very competitive keyword that my client had been ranking well on for quite some time.
So this is where it got very interesting. While running the competitive analysis I noticed that this particular website had around 2,000 links pointing to it. Upon further investigation I found that exactly 1,768 of them links were nothing more than No-Follow blog comments, leaving the other 250 links that were of course do-follow.
After going through all of the 250 links that were Do-Follow I noticed that some of them were clearly paid links and the other ones didn’t hold much weight, most of them were stuff like social profiles that were clearly set up to give this site a link.
Upon further investigation the story started to thicken a little. I found that the only links that did point to this site that said the specific keyword were the No-Follow links. Now this really started to make me wonder, if this person, with only 250 links can pass my clients site which has 52,683 links pointing to it (some of which specifically say this keyword) and other competitor sites that have just as many links to say the least (some having 10x as many links) is Google counting these no-follow links. I really wouldn’t have questioned this if this term wasn’t extremely competitive. I mean it is a main industry term for this niche. Also it seemed as though even though these paid links were clearly paid for, they were of low quality and all but about 5 of them links were not even relating to this niche. On the other hand the No-Follow links were from very high quality blogs and for the most part were on topic to the niche.
What do you think about this? Comments are welcome.
As a side note I think I will run a test over the next couple of weeks to see if this theory is true
or if this is just a fluke/coincidence.
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I am also looking for answers to this. I have seen many sites that rank well for keywords such as "cheap ugg boots" "cheap auto insurance" and they all rank well by spamming nofollow keyword links.
-Kai