Yes, I do agree with WebDave, Web directories with No Follow links are useless, we don't get any kind of profit from them, submitting them is totally waste of time. Not all the web directories are No Follow, only 1 or 2% are nofollow directories.
Robdale
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Do you mean then that NOFOLLOW links get second (or last) priority? So that--say theoretically--all of the DOFOLLOW links are crawled, the Google goes on to the NOFOLLOW ones?
The NoFollow links are of no use because the rel="nofollow" tag is made to indicate the search engine robots "Not to crawl the hyperlinks in the body of this document".
So, though the search engine crawls the content the links will not be crawl and cannot be counted as a backlink.
Robdale
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1. Why no follow links? do we get any benefit on our site if we submit to these types of directories?
Nofollow is Google / Yahoo's attempt at stopping the buying/selling link business by encouraging publishers to use nofollow on all links that they sell and then convincing the industry that nofollowed links don't carry any SEO weight.
The "legitimate" reason that they exist is because a link on a page is considered a "vote" for the page being linked to, and the search engines wanted to give publishers a tool to help the bots distinguish between publisher-contributed links and user-contributed links (blog comments, etc). They also recommend to the industry that all links not endorsed by the publisher should be nofolloweed by the publisher ... which, in turn, includes comments, advertisement links, etc.
We do know this is the authentic reason the search engines had for creating the nofollow attribute, and how they intend it to be used. However, "nofollow" is just a suggestion and not a rule. In other words, when we as publishers using it, we are "suggesting" to Googlebot that we didn't post the link on our website ourselves, but we aren't giving Googlebot a strict rule to not follow it. In other words, it's not like a robots.txt file where we can specify pages on our site not to crawl which all search engine spiders are supposed to always obey.
We also don't know exactly how much of a role nofollow means in the actual ranking algorithm, and what else comes into play. However, I have seen significant SEO improvements exclusively through nofollowed links!!!
2. For directories that offer free regular links, how do we know that they offer real free links? or hidden NO FOLLOW links?
View the html source of the page and see if the link is nofollowed or not. If you can't find a link directly on the page, it probably is through a redirection service or JavaScript and doesn't get any SEO benefit at all (or a tiny bit).
cscgal
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