Let's talk a little bit about nofollow.
Here's a few questions we got.
Vince Samios from the UK asks, do you feel that all the widespread and blanket use of nofollow Tags is devaluing Google search algorithms? Let me just interject before where I finished the question, even though SEOs may feel like no follow is everywhere on the web.
If you look at the percentage of links that have no follow, it's actually a pretty minuscule percentage.
So no follows aren't that common on the web compared to how the perception of them might be?
Let me finish the question now.
Examples such as Wikipedia where all external links are no follow this Wikipedia mean nothing to Google's algorithms.
And then Jonathan from Brighton, UK asks, Do Google take into account quality factors from no followed links when the links come from well established authority sites such as Wikipedia?
So we're not taking into account the links from Wikipedia because they are not followed.
So if you don't bother to go spamming Wikipedia, it's not going to make any difference in search engine rankings.
If you get a link because that will be no followed if you have a great resource and people find it via Wikipedia, and it's just fantastic.
And people link to that because of that, or you're getting traffic from a link in terms of direct surfers or visitors, then that might benefit your site.
But it's not going to get any search engine ranking boost just because Wikipedia links to you with those no follow links. Now let me take a one slide detour and mention that if a particular site does have trust in the person who's making a link, then there's plenty of good reasons to make that link flow page rank and take the no follow up.
So for example, Wikipedia has experimented with all kinds of different ways to improve their process.
Maybe anonymous edits have to be approved before they go live. So you could certainly imagine a scenario in which a Wikipedia editor who was very trusted who had made a ton of edits without them ever being reverted.
That other Editors vouched for, however they wanted to define trust. Those links might, for example, take the no follow off. So a very simple thing when you're being under attack from spammers is to add that no follow tag and then it doesn't benefit the spammers anymore.
But if you run a blog or a forum or Wikipedia or whatever, and you can come up with a good metric to say, okay, these are links that we do trust that we do think are editorially given and are valuable for users, then there's plenty of good reasons to go ahead and say, okay, make those links flow page rank.
But in general, no follow links are a relatively small percentage of the web, and it does prevent a lot of sites from getting spammed. We don't use those links from Wikipedia currently.
But if Wikipedia wanted to put a more nuanced policy in place. I would definitely support that.