In a recent SEO Fightclub Youtube video, Ted Kubaitis claimed that you should nofollow links, such as your social media links, to retain link juice/authority. We this this will not work after a comment that Matt Cutts made some time ago about page rank sculpting now being ineffective. We test it out to see the truth of the matter.
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Test 375 can no-following a link retain link juice on the page? This is from James Goldsmith. He is a viewer of SEO Fight Club. Ted Kubaitis, myself and Kyle Roof do a show weekly for everyone for free. Ted mentioned that he does and recommends no-following your social media links on your website in order to maintain link juice.
As a matter of note, I don't do that but I have all my social media sites optimized. I think this is coming from the position where people are… I'm not sure that most people are doing it correctly or in Ted’s view or just something that he likes to use as a matter of course because he used to always do it. I'm not sure. But I don't no-follow mine.
I optimize my Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. I have a link back to the money site so that the link juice is always passed around in a nice big circle. That method works for me. So why mess with it. Plus, it ranks those social properties along with my website for my brand and then I get some more out of that as well.
The argument here is that if you do it, you can actually retain the link juice and authority on your website and so much as if you're building backlinks and not promoting your social media profiles. [Gruff voice] I'm not giving my link to Facebook etc.
To me, in my opinion, that's kind of short-sighted but I pride myself to be able to take over brand names and stuff. And that's number one, the easiest thing you can show your clients is slick... “You guys weren't ranking for your brand name and I have this process now and have taken over an entire page one. Branding is in effect, let's start leveraging that branding.”
So this test was paid to set up five pages each set up for indexing and then sent some links to the page that was ranking in the middle and they added a nofollow attribute to social. So here's a link he made, kind of the process and how he did it. He emulated the social. Here’s the internal links and then the stuff that he used to send.
You see just one and it did retain more authority, which I think more had retained more link juice from the links that were provided. However, was it significant enough to do it? I'm not necessarily sure. Neither is the tester. You almost have to leave them for two months for that to mature. I think, honestly, if you're getting up to a 3 position or 2 position just by no-following is kind of a waste of time unless you're in this crazy competitive market where that one little tiny bump is actually worthwhile.
Like I said though if you're optimizing your social media properties properly then that actually compounds upon itself any links you build your Facebook and stuff from other third party sources. Share as part of your FTTT rings if you're into that kind of thing or if you are doing domain authority stacking under that old model, which still works by the way.
On all those are interlinked and you're passing all the power through your ring through your brand so I'm not sure it was worthwhile at this time but this is a nice test. The idea is sound. The application of it is sound. I just don't know. I have not seen… like when I did it in a real world where I have no following and all that stuff. I didn’t notice a difference. It just doesn't make sense to me so why would you bother with it? So I never did. I never maintained it.