Google ignoring nofollow???

by JoMo
12 replies
I got an email from potpiegirl.c0m saying that google is ignoring nofollow on links. It is supposed to be "PR sculpting" or some crap. Is this true? And if so, why did they all of the sudden decide this was "bad" for SEO'n???

WTF?!?!?!
#google #ignoring #nofollow
  • Profile picture of the author rondo
    The news is that they are ignoring internal nofollow links which are often used by advanced SEOers to manipulate their own pagerank (pr sculpting).

    This isn't about link building from other sites.

    Andrew
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  • Profile picture of the author jaggyjay
    You may want to use javascript for pr sculpting as Big G can change their minds at any time regarding the use of "nofollow".

    - Jay
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  • Profile picture of the author Steven Carl Kelly
    Google doesn't ignore "nofollow" tags. What Google is doing, and has been doing, is following "nofollow" tags for INDEXING purposes but there is no juice passed from the linking page to the linked page. It simply means that the linked-to page gets one more backlink count but no other benefit to the link.
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    • Profile picture of the author Brian Robinson
      Originally Posted by Steven Carl Kelly View Post

      Google doesn't ignore "nofollow" tags. What Google is doing, and has been doing, is following "nofollow" tags for INDEXING purposes but there is no juice passed from the linking page to the linked page.
      I agree Steve. Actually, in my experience, Google has ALWAYS followed no-follow links with their spiders.

      I'd make several sites and have the "link juice" turned off and those other linked sites would be found and indexed! I would never promote them or submit them but G would discover them.

      I'm glad someone else noticed this too. One person is a nut, two people are a movement. :rolleyes:

      (I like your avatar BTW!)
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  • Profile picture of the author rondo
    Brian, Steve, this thread is referring to the news of recent weeks about pr sculpting, rather than linking between sites.


    Andrew
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  • Yes and no. They are using them however they see fit and not spilling the beans on exactly their purpose.

    I have some links in my Google Webmaster Account that are showing up as nofollow and others that are being crawled. It's very hit and miss.

    The "PR Sculpting" issue has been talked about a lot lately and apparently Google is not applying nofollow to these internal links as stated above.

    Google is very big on saying what they want you to hear... then doing what they want.
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  • Profile picture of the author stevewalter
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  • Profile picture of the author JoMo
    I am about to start doing a complete redesign on our plaquemaster.com site, and I was going to use the nofollow tag to tailor how my internal linking was handled (I don't want any juice going to my "about" or "contact" pages and such). But if G isn't concerned with nofollow any more then I don't see much point in using it.

    I guess I could just do the links I don't want G to care about in java and do the others in html/css.
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  • Profile picture of the author SteveJohnson
    'nofollow' is not the same as 'noindex'. Google will follow any links it finds, that's its job and it does it well.

    Putting a nofollow attribute on a link does nothing other than to tell the Big G that you don't endorse the importance of a particular link. It doesn't mean that they won't follow the link and index the destination page.
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  • Profile picture of the author Nonny
    You guys might be interested in Google employee Matt Cutt's post on the subject:

    PageRank sculpting
    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[*].

    So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let's leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn't count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
    It does look like Google does follow "nofollow" links, but they don't "count" towards search engine rankings. See his post for discussion of "PageRank sculpting".
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    • Profile picture of the author Justin Jordan
      Semi Paranoid Pure Speculation - It would make a certain amount of logical sense for Google to at least consider nofollow links. A site that is linked only by follow links (or above a certain percentage of follow links) would indicate a conscious effort to manipulate search engines results.

      A site that is ranking organically would have a mix of follow and no follow links, and if Google hasn't determined what that ratio should be and factors it into their rankings, I'd be shocked. But I have evidence that's the case.
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