Does anyone kmow a decent study on the % of entirely natural links which are nofollows?
This isn't for linkbuilding as I look at it by industry for that, but for a pure 'if we achieve 1000 totally natural links how many of these will be nofollows?' theoretical question.
I've been looking in majestic at sites where I judge the link profiles to be natural and its surprisingly small - obviously its hard to find commercial examples where you can be sure of a natural profile unless you know the owner but I'm tending to find slightly less than 10% nofollow at the moment, which really doesn't play at all into what I would expect based on the number of sites out there which nofollow as standard.
I've looked at alltime links and recent, in case old ones were skewing, and also tried removing deleted....
I think I might be seeing skewed results because what I'm looking at is either very trusted or very niche and thus they get a bit of a free pass, but would be good to compare with some other results from somewhere...
apparantly MC once stated it was around 10% - if anyone can point me to that (or even confirm they remember him saying it somewhere) that would be hugely useful!
"A single digit percentage"
http://www.webpronews.com/matt-cutts-nofollow-links-are-small-single-digit-percentage-of-links-on-the-web-2012-07
The article is 2 and a half years old though.
lovely - thanks BoL
so perhaps my data is right then - is working out to about 7% on average.
seems too low. Where are these lovely innocent webmasters willing to link naturally to commercial sites?!
I think it's way too skewed by there being very few purely natural sites with natural links.
Does such a vertical exist anymore?
I've been looking at wikipedia, bbc, google, yahoo, adobe and a couple of commercial sites that I or others here are 99% sure have never done any linkbuilding... but it is hard, and many of them have a bit of an internet savvy slant (but whether that makes for more or less nofollows than average I don't know).
>wikipedia, bbc, google, yahoo, adobe
maybe have never done any link building themselves (though not so sure about some of them), but most will have been leveraged and targeted by 3rd parties wanting to manipulate SERPs.
I'm with Jason on this - I don't think entirely natural link profiles exists at a scale that can be identified and analysed.
The new gold standard is "minimally abused"
you're right, in fact I may have even done some links to some of them myself in the past... hmmm.
OK - gut feel - % of nofollows if you produced a cracking bit of content which gained loads of natural links?
We're talking theoretical here, not getting bogged down in the liklihood of that in realiity!
The most recent example that went stellar is the Glitter spoof.
https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?q=http%3A%2F%2Fshipyourenemiesglitter.com%2F
External Backlinks :12,745
Referring Domains: 1,424
Referring IPs: 1,105
Referring Subnets: 877
thanks Jason, that's awesome, works out to about 18% nf from Majestic which is a lot closer to where I would have expected!