During the Question and Answer segment in a John Mueller hangout, an SEO professional asked John about using PR services to spread out their PR articles.
The service publishes on various websites, mostly with nofollow.
Also, sometimes, they don’t have a nofollow on these sites.
Their main question is: what should they do with the dofollow links? Should they disavow them or should they not be using a PR service at all?
John explained that from Google’s point of view, if you’re taking care of the bulk of the issue, then that situation is generally okay.
It’s also not something that John would worry too much about.
If it’s the case that the SEO professional is using a PR service and 99 percent of the links have a normal link to the site, and 1 percent of them have a nofollowed, then this could be seen as being a little bit fishy.
If, however, you’re saying that most of these links are nofollowed, like they should be for PR articles, I would not worry about this.
This happens at approximately the 37:38 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
A backlink question. We’re using PR services to spread out our PR articles. This service publishes on various websites, mostly with nofollow. And I think it goes into sometimes they don’t have a nofollow on these sites. What should we do with those dofollow links? Should we disavow them or not use a PR service at all?
John (Answer) 38:00
From our point of view, if you’re taking care of the bulk of the issue, then that’s generally okay. And that’s not something that I would worry too much about. If it’s the case that you’re using this PR service and 99% of the links have a normal link to your website, and 1% has a nofollow on it, then that seems a little bit fishy. But if you’re saying that most of these links are nofollow, like they should be for PR articles, I would not worry about this.
