Nofollow DOES Pass Pagerank??!!

[TZ]

So a week or so ago I was in a thread with Scott G. and we disagreed on whether or not nofollow links pass Google juice.

Scott was sure the nofollow links pass PR, and I was sure that they didn't.

Being adults we were kind to each other and respectfully disagreed, and moved on. LOVE guys like Scott who don't have thin skins and insecure egos.

ANYWAY - this blogger did a VERY interesting test!
SEO Experiment: Nofollow Links DO Pass Value & Rankings in Google | SocialSEO.com

You know. I have to admit. I always wondered why the bloggers who are active commentors always seem to have high PR?

We learn something new every day.

[paulgl]

I have always thought nofollow does something.

But it does not pass PR or anchor text, but they
probably don't ignore surrounding or contextual text.
Which is what they may be confusing.

PR alone does not equate to SERPs.

Many of the WF threads will be found #1 in a matter of minutes, if
one searched for them. No links, no PR.

Kind of a moot experiment.

I use all links for targeted traffic, nofollow or not.

Paul

[paulgl]

Sure enough. Just do a search for:

So a week or so ago I was in a thread with Scott G.

This thread is #1 on google. No PR, no backlinks, no nothing.
What conclusion can we draw from that?

Paul

[Dharmanath]

Frankly i stopped caring about follow / nofollow links its too tedious for me to find out. I go for any place i can get a link relevant to my topic and not a spam.

But one thing is for sure, I feel it does add up to the total tally irrespective of link juice plus if my input is good the visitor will follow to my link. So it evens out.

[Georgech]

I believe that nofollow links can affect rankings...But I always think that nofollow links don't pass any link juice to the targeted page... Very interest and valuable experiment to explore about this point...

[TZ]

Good discussion. I think I am going to do as Dharmanath mentioned and quit "judging links".

If you feel like making a worth comment, go for it. Get the link. Worst thing that happen is the blog owner sees your blog and writes a special post on yours. Happened yesterday and it felt really good;
ONLINE MONEY-MAKER #7: Terry Zulit and his $13,188 from Google Adsense in one month

I know....shameful ;-)

[BenJackson]

Originally Posted by paulgl

I have always thought nofollow does something.

But it does not pass PR or anchor text, but they
probably don't ignore surrounding or contextual text.
Which is what they may be confusing.

I feel the same way, it's down to speculation though. Anchor text is technically the closest surrounding text to the link (obviously it is in the link), so I can see them possibly ignoring all surrounding text as well, but just mention that anchor text isn't passed.

Either way it's just speculation, but I think there are probably other elements such as trust that might still get passed through a "nofollow" link. Example: a Wikipedia link.

[scott g]

Originally Posted by TZ

So a week or so ago I was in a thread with Scott G. and we disagreed on whether or not nofollow links pass Google juice.

Scott was sure the nofollow links pass PR, and I was sure that they didn't.

Being adults we were kind to each other and respectfully disagreed, and moved on. LOVE guys like Scott who don't have thin skins and insecure egos.

ANYWAY - this blogger did a VERY interesting test!
SEO Experiment: Nofollow Links DO Pass Value & Rankings in Google | SocialSEO.com

You know. I have to admit. I always wondered why the bloggers who are active commentors always seem to have high PR?

We learn something new every day.

AWESOME post and find TZ! Another reason why this is the best SEO/IM Forum out there!

CHEERS!

[Riverstix]

The reason pages can rank number one without any backlinks or PR is because they are on high authority domains for the most part.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by Riverstix

The reason pages can rank number one without any backlinks or PR is because they are on high authority domains for the most part.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! (Just change the word "domains" to "websites")

I tweet nofollow links fom a PR5 twitter account...

No question some nofollow links are valuable. The debate will be honing in
on the parameters of "value."

I don't think this debate will ever end. I do wish people would start realizing
that whether a link is nofollow or not, the bottom line is getting targeted
visitors to a decent authority site. Building trust and a web footprint,
nofollow or not, cannot be ignored.

Paul

[Fraggler]

Originally Posted by paulgl

This thread is #1 on google. No PR, no backlinks, no nothing.
What conclusion can we draw from that?

That the term has no competition and this forum has enough PR flowing through it that new pages don't need any external links to make them relevant.

PR is dynamic. You know that. A new thread on this forum will have more PR than an established page on a site with no reputation (PR).

PR does affect the SERPs, but a result must be relevant to begin with. They work together. Backlinks work due to their PR and Relevance.

That experiment shows that nofollow may pass through anchor text relevance - and that's very cool. It doesn't prove a thing about PR, especially when they keywords and therefore competition aren't defined.

[SanDiegoSEOConsulting]

Hi. This is my first post here. I searched the net because I was also curios if nofollow passed PR. I did a bunch of tests where I signed up websites and I never added them to webmaster too or registered them but I started commenting in blogs with the URL and what I found was that my sites were indexed.

It seems that google does follow nofollows but doesn't rank them IMO

[Dentist]

They don't pass PR. Take my word for it. One of my websites has over 10,000 Page PR 3-4-5-6-7 no-follow (many low OBL) backlinks with its own PR of 2. If they would pass PR my website's PR will be 6 or 7

No-follow as far as I could read just does one thing. If the backlinks are generated organically, there are many no-follow backlinks among them simply because many of the popular websites on the net have no-follow outbound links. Now, if you have many backlinks to your website with zero or very few no-follow backlinks then that could be a sign that you don't get your backlinks organically. That seems to be what they do. They are one of the many methods of validation of your backlinking methodology.

In-terms of anchor, they don't pass anchor either. I tested that out with 200 different anchors from no-follow yet high PR (page) links to one of my authority websites. I tried new keywords and none of them had a SERP change a bit, so per my experience they don't pass Anchor either.

[jgant]

Thanks for the article. Good stuff. I think the article would be improved if they gave more data about the keywords such as competition data.

You can rank low hanging fruit with no links.

[RevSEO]

Great article....but next week we'll see 15 more threads talking about how NoFollow links are a waste of time....

Whatever

The point is this though, if you are manually building links then obviously focus on the DoFollow link over the NoFollow. But don't kill yourself trying to find only DoFollow links.

Remember that NoFollow links are all part of a NATURAL backlink profile. You won't find a single high ranking site that doesn't have some NoFollow.

Don't build a ridiculously obscure backlink profile with ZERO DoFollow links.

[thebitbotdotcom]

Sorry guys. I'm going to have to call BS on this one. I have been doing some experimenting of my own for the last several months and have been building nofollow links ranging from pr1-pr4 all nofollow all pointing to one page and guess what. The page is still PRNA. how do you explain that?

Nofollow passes absolutely nothing...sip...nada. zilch...

[Mike Anthony]

Old thread but since others are commenting - the test was worthless. Why buy two domains for a test that you know you are going to publish as an experiment for others to see and then hide the domains and the keywords and serp etc. The whole point of a test and experiment is to PROVE what you are saying.

Once you hide all the data all you are saying is - trust us. Trust us is not proof. DO we know the sites got no links? Nope. Can we see an increase in PR? don't believe I saw that. Can we figure out if any other factor was isolated and excluded for? No we know nothing about the serp, the content, the pages or even the links. We can't even verify that all the links were nofollowed. Every piece of data is hidden by the author. pretty worthless as an experiment made to prove a point when no one can verify or recheck anything.

[webdevpro]

What we think that nofolow passes no link juice could be 99.99% true. But it may be possible that if you got a nofollow link from a high authority sites like (wikipedia, microsoft .. just examples) then it may have some importance. Just a guess.

[Russell Barnstein]

Even IF NoFollow DIDN'T pass link love, (it does) you'd be a fool not to target those types of links. I've often heard people complain about poor results when they only target DoFollow. Why? It's not a natural footprint. Not to mention that if you and everyone else here is targeting DoFollow only, what do you think that does to the value of DoFollow links?

It's the same thing with people that don't target low-PR backlinks.

You need to target everything, not just to create a beautiful footprint, but because it all works! Target NoFollow, DoFollow, PR0s, PR8s, and YES- target blogs and websites that are totally unrelated to yours.