You misunderstood me. I never said you have to build social signals or that they wouldn't come naturally. If you're obtaining dofollow links naturally, then of course social signals come naturally. But someone who is a noob and trying to game the SERPs, hears "PBNs, web 2.0s, etc.. are good but nofollow links do nothing" These guys then go and purchase a ton of PBNs, Web 2.0s, and have 0 social signals. No social signals on the PBNs or properties as well. This is NO GOOD and will not work.
Buying 2.0s, PBNs, and juicing them with tons of social signals and relevant PBNs is working. People can argue and say that maybe the content I'm writing is just really search engine friendly, well if that was the case my new site would be ranking its ass off because I'm testing a content marketing strategy and relying on all legit White Hat. Them I'm syndicating my blog with multiple properties and listing those properties in Google+ as my links.
Yes it's climbing but not as fast as the sites I'm juicing with signals and minimal linking.
Like I said I do throw a few high quality links at the sites that are ranking (CF 30 TF33) but I really run my bots hard and inflate my social networks.
I'm not really sure if you are promoting disinformation or you just don't know. But I've been testing multiple methods utilizing social media to rank sites for 2-3 years. In fact it even works for my local clients. social citations are huge right now. Possibly minimal nofollow and a lot of DoFollow works. Not sure how you obtain dofollow naturally with out a social media presence today, and maybe you can provide some insight on that. Most of my naturally obtained links were due to the promotion of content amongst social networks.
Other then that it's the old school blog commenting and leaving the link in the comment, hoping that it doesn't get removed. Or communicating with blog owners personally, which will get tedious. So tell me, if you're natural dofollow links are obtained without social media, you're utilizing what I've just said? You can't honestly say youre ranking in competitive niches with 0 social signals and a ton of DoFOllow backlinks. That would be a footprint all on its own.
That is not really true. I cannot think of a single time that I have built a nofollow link in any SEO project I have worked on. I've been doing SEO for over 12 years now.
And yes, sites do attract a decent number of nofollow links on their own. Scraper sites and other data sites will create nofollow links.
You can rank just perfectly fine in highly, highly competitive niches without building nofollow links just fine. Building nofollow links is just a waste of time and/or money.
I have done a lot of testing with social signals and have found zero evidence of them having an impact on rankings, whether it is to juice up linking domains or money sites.
Think about it from Google's perspective. There is just no way they are going to give significant weight to something that they can be locked out of at any moment. Remember when they were blocked from crawling Twitter? That sort of thing could happen at any moment. It would be too much of a gamble on their part.
