Today's question comes from Ed in the Caribbean eds in a somewhat bad mood because he asks, how can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of Internet users are unable to post a followed link on the World Wide Web, for example, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia are all no follow. It seems only a very small percentage of links count.
Well, let me start with the second point, which is the only a small percentage of links count.
If you actually look at the volume of links on the web, and then look at the percentage of those links that have the no follow attribute, it turns out that's a very small percentage.
I know that the perception is that whenever you're trying to get links, they're all no followed and you can't get them.
And so that makes a lot of people grumpy because they want to get as many links and they want to be followed links.
But the fact is, if you look at the Internet almost like a pie chart or a bar chart, the number of links that have the no follow attribute is still very small compared with the total pool of links on the Web.
So how can linking remain a part of a major search algorithm and the majority of Internet users are unable to post a followed link? My answer to that is that anyone can post a followed link if they make their own website.
So the trick is make your own website and make something so compelling so interesting that people want to link to your site.
And typically, whenever people want to link to your site, they'll link with a link that is followed.
For example, all the people who blog about things, all the people who write about stuff online, a lot of those links actually in the content of blogs or in the content of new stories, do flow page drink.
And so those are editorial decisions made on the basis of merit. So if you make something that's really great, you'll find that it's not that hard to get links that do have the follow or do not have the no follow attribute.
So I know that some of the common places that a lot of people hang out might have no follow, and that might feel a little discouraging, but bear in mind that that's only some of the web. It turns out there's a lot of the web which does have the follow attribute, or that does pass page rank, and you can definitely get links if you end up making something really excellent that a lot of people want to know about.
A lot of people want to tell their friends about.