3 No-Follow Questions...

[Chris Sweeney]

So I've heard mixed answers from a lot of different people, and I was wondering if anyone knows the answers to these questions about the no-follow tag. Here's what I found to be the consensus for my three questions, but I'm still not sure if they are right, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

1) Do links with the no-follow tag pass the anchor text referral for SEO purposes?

No. That's the whole reason the no-follow tag was created - to eliminate blog comment spam by deterring spammers from doing so, so that spammers would think "Oh, this link won't be of any value anyway, so why place it here?".

2) Do links with the no-follow tag pass PR?

No.

3) Do search engines still follow a no-follow link, or do they just see the link and not follow it?

Well I assume the latter, that the search engines see the link and refuse to go through to the URL that is linked. They will not follow it, hence the name "no-follow".

Now I could be wrong about any or all of these, and I'd like to know everyone else's answers.

[erictan678]

me too. some say that nofollow will still help improve the SERPs. Anybody tried link-building with only no-follow links? and what are the results?

[theseoguys]

From my experience, here is what you need to know about no-follow. Treat them as any other link. Nobody can give you a precise answer to your questions. Before I knew what I knew...I took a site to page 1, with roughly 100 million results. I found a tool the other week, and studied my links. More than half were no follow. I was surpirised myself. It still holds a top 7 ranking, fluctuates between 4 and 7, has since May, will little content injection. I have been building roughly 100 links per month, or to me, the bare minimum. So to answer your 3 questions, subsitute, No with yes or possibly or probably.

[AnitaCross]

Originally Posted by Chris Sweeney

So I've heard mixed answers from a lot of different people, and I was wondering if anyone knows the answers to these questions about the no-follow tag. Here's what I found to be the consensus for my three questions, but I'm still not sure if they are right, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

1) Do links with the no-follow tag pass the anchor text referral for SEO purposes?

No. That's the whole reason the no-follow tag was created - to eliminate blog comment spam by deterring spammers from doing so, so that spammers would think "Oh, this link won't be of any value anyway, so why place it here?".

2) Do links with the no-follow tag pass PR?

No.

3) Do search engines still follow a no-follow link, or do they just see the link and not follow it?

Well I assume the latter, that the search engines see the link and refuse to go through to the URL that is linked. They will not follow it, hence the name "no-follow".

Now I could be wrong about any or all of these, and I'd like to know everyone else's answers.

"Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. Nofollow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext." ~ Matt Cutts, (full post here)

So according to Cutts, you are correct about questions 1 and 2. The post is old, but I believe it is still accurate.

I didn't find anything definitive about whether or not the search engines still follow the nofollow links. As Cutts is specific on what nofollow links don't pass, I would expect him to also say they don't even crawl those links, if that was the case. But he doesn't. So my guess is that Google crawls the links anyway, but doesn't apply any additional value to the destination.

Hope this helps,
-Anita

[paulgl]

That's right. Nofollow does not pass PR and disregard anchor text.

It does not mean no index, or no crawl, or no see.

Notice what Matt Cutts says, I (referring to the page) do not
vouch for the link. What a search engine vouches for is anyone's
guess. My suspicion is that some do count for something, even
if that something is not PR, especially in things like twitter from
high PR twitter accounts.

Paul

[Vincenzo Oliva]

Lie #5 (credit to Justin Brooks)
No Follow Links Don’t Count

NoFollow is a parameter Google invented to try and satisfy bloggers who
were complaining about blog spam ruining their high PR scores in Google.
Most people are told that NoFollow links will do nothing for them. That
they don't count. This is not true and here's my story as to why it's not
true...

Situation:
Mr. A has a fancy blog with high PR and spammer A comes to the site and
steals a link by making a comment. With Google's old system some of
that PR leaks out to the spammers site.

Reality:
So Google says hey if everyone uses NoFollow then no more PR will leak
out I promise. However, not all the search engines adopted this plan and
Google is the only search engine that cares about PR - So it didn't work.

Point 1:
Never did Google ever say that it would not recognize the link. It just said
that it would not allow the PR to leak when they do their fancy PR
equations.

Point 2:
Since the other search engines and Google all spider each other and the
other search engines don't follow the whole NoFollow game - Ask.com
ends up spidering your link from some blog and indexes you (even though
it is nofollow) and then Google spiders Ask and finds your link in their
index...

Proof:
Everyone in the SEO industry uses Yahoo Site Explorer to track how many SEO LIES

TRUTHS
links they have and see where they are coming from.
Put my friends blog through Yahoo Site Explorer and you'll find he has
over 16,000 backlinks. Most of them are all NoFollow like this one I just
swiped by viewing source on one of the blogs that are linking to his blog
via comment...

<p class="comment_author"><a href="http://successfool.com"
rel="external nofollow">Alejandro Reyes</a></p>

I could provide these examples over and over. Put simply, the other
search engines don't care about NoFollow like Google does – So it
doesn't work like Google wanted it too. And it never meant that the search
engines can't see the link.

Edit For The Critics:
I am not saying NoFollow is 100% B.S. - I am saying that it is not
something to fear or stay away from completely. There are great uses for
NoFollow on your own sites to manipulate your PR flow in-site.
I have found in my daily experiences that NoFollow links are not
completely worthless like most people are saying. Obviously, a DoFollow
link is more valuable then a NoFollow.

[officer_iron]

I think nofollow links definitely should not be avoided. Whether or not Google passes pr through them, there are other benefits. As with anything SEO related, I don't know for a fact, but I have heard that the anchor text from a nofollow link does still help as it gives Google a better idea of what your link is supposed to be about.

Also, using a mixture of nofollow and dofollow links makes your backlinking efforts look more natural to the search engines. Google may be smart enough to realize that every single one of your backlinks is a dofollow, and that looks fishy. Google likes natural backlinking, or at least what appears to be natural backlinking.

[Chris Sweeney]

Originally Posted by AnitaCross

"Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. Nofollow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext." ~ Matt Cutts, (full post here)

So according to Cutts, you are correct about questions 1 and 2. The post is old, but I believe it is still accurate.

I didn't find anything definitive about whether or not the search engines still follow the nofollow links. As Cutts is specific on what nofollow links don't pass, I would expect him to also say they don't even crawl those links, if that was the case. But he doesn't. So my guess is that Google crawls the links anyway, but doesn't apply any additional value to the destination.

Hope this helps,
-Anita

Thanks for the link to the Matt Cutts reference. It's good to see it straight from the horses mouth. However, I'm also still unsure about #3. I think I'd agree with you though. Google's spider is always looking for food, i.e. new content and pages to index, so I think they would still crawl the no-follow links and not pass any PR or SEO value.

Originally Posted by Vincenzo Oliva

Lie #5 (credit to Justin Brooks)
No Follow Links Don’t Count

NoFollow is a parameter Google invented to try and satisfy bloggers who
were complaining about blog spam ruining their high PR scores in Google.
Most people are told that NoFollow links will do nothing for them. That
they don't count. This is not true and here's my story as to why it's not
true...

Situation:
Mr. A has a fancy blog with high PR and spammer A comes to the site and
steals a link by making a comment. With Google's old system some of
that PR leaks out to the spammers site.....I have found in my daily experiences that NoFollow links are not completely worthless like most people are saying. Obviously, a DoFollow link is more valuable then a NoFollow.

I actually think I do remember seeing a video (from the Google Webmaster YouTube page) about what you said about other search engines not even paying attention to the nofollow tag. So yes, I think you're right in saying that even if Google does not crawl a nofollow link, other sites still will, then Google will crawl those other sites and find it anyway.

Originally Posted by paulgl

That's right. Nofollow does not pass PR and disregard anchor text.

It does not mean no index, or no crawl, or no see.

Notice what Matt Cutts says, I (referring to the page) do not
vouch for the link. What a search engine vouches for is anyone's
guess. My suspicion is that some do count for something, even
if that something is not PR, especially in things like twitter from
high PR twitter accounts.

Paul

I actually post links to my new sites on Twitter even though it's nofollow as a step in getting my sites indexed. Not sure how beneficial it is, but I do it anyway for good practice.

Thanks everyone for your answers!

[raviv]

Hey Chris
This rel=nofollow tag has been the subject of intense discussion for a long time in the SEO field.

There was a time (maybe 2 years ago) when nofollow was so enthusiastically applied that a lot of the SEO gurus started propounding link sculpting. This means to preserve the PR of the home page, SEO professionals advised site owners to make the COntact Us, About, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions etc pages as nofollow links.

Through internal page rank sculpting, the idea was to flow link juice to the more important inner pages (aka money pages) from the site owner/user perspective. This was widely discussed and maybe it is still being followed sincerely by many to this day.

This is when Matt Cutts said that Google and its superior algorithm would decide the value of a link (be it follow or nofollow) and humans should concentrate on creating relevant better content and concentrate on that so that Google can display relevant search results.

In fact, it is after this point that FAQ, Contact Us, About Us pages were required to improve the quality score of landing pages in PPC marketing. Even today lot of Adwords accounts get banned because of lack of a verifiable Contact Us and About Us page. It is no longer possible to hide behind an email or a contact form and promote shady sites or sites of questionable quality.

When humans started hijacking the concept of Pagerank and using artificial methods to preserve or flow link juice around a site, Google came out against link sculpting and advised users to concentrate on building good sites.

It is the concept of Pagerank itself that has thrown all the focus on backlinks, the PR of the page from which backlinks are obtained, the OBL factor with some site owners even scared to link to any other site for fear of leaking PR etc. The World Wide Web is an intricate web of links and if the basis of the web is flouted for the sake of preventing PR from going anywhere, then it leaves a lot to be desired as to how this whole concept of PR is being viewed in its current form today.

A link is a link and it helps a user find a site which he/she was not aware of. If the site has good quality content, users are going to stick and return for more. It is not going to be because of a #1 ranking on Page 1 of Google for a highly competitive niche where the site sucks so much that there is a 95% bounce rate. It is meaningless to have such a position at all.

Best
Raviv

[Georgech]

As far as I am concerned, various search engines see Nofollow slightly differently. I was told that Google will follow the nofollow links, however, there is no link juice to be passed to the linked pages.

Besides, the linked pages will not be indexed as well.

Since the nofollow links are actually "followed" by Google and some major search engines, the links have certain value in the eyes of Google.

Building some nofollow links along with dofollow links is more natural than just focusing on building dofollow links.

For my case, I've been having positive result in terms of organic search engine results by building some nofollow links ...


George