Is Google now following NOFOLLOW links now and then?

14 years ago

It's hard for people to understand how or why, but Google does follow and give value to at least some nofollow links.

I have seen this with many of my sites - the better the ratio of dofollow-nofollow, the better my rankings are. But, this is something that is very hard to prove, because with SEO you can't do the same test twice.

Cheers,

Josip

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paulgl 14 years ago

They may show up, but are they counting for anything?

I think that's where the discussion has morphed. Just
because you see a link, is it contributing to PR? Is it
contributing to reputation? Authority?

People think no follow links are many different things.

The one thing google created them for was to not
pass PR to them. Nothing to do with crawling or indexing.

The whole "no follow" thing as been a dismal failure IMHO.

Google has got to do something now or later. Probably
more on the line of showing all links they find, but discounting
some. How do we know which ones "count" more? Well, it
certainly should be non no follow links on high PR sites.

I myself have never stressed out on the total number of backlinks,
but the quality. I rank quite high with a handful.

Paul
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Adam Roy

14 years ago

That's going to kill amazon and ecommerce style sites.

Some online businesses/stores/whatever else affiliates create simply require a lot of links.

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Josip Barbaric 14 years ago

Originally Posted by friend

That's going to kill amazon and ecommerce style sites.

Some online businesses/stores/whatever else affiliates create simply require a lot of links.

I am not sure I understand why this would be bad for anyone - only maybe for gullible marketers that don't test anything on their own and blindly follow someone else's advice.

Josip
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paulgl 14 years ago

Originally Posted by friend

That's going to kill amazon and ecommerce style sites.

Some online businesses/stores/whatever else affiliates create simply require a lot of links.

Not sure if my comment below is on exactly what you are referring to.
The past 2 months I noticed a dramatic increase in amazon orders. They were coming
from a page I made for best books in a niche. Nothing but amazon links. The only
linking this site has is internal. I checked the keyphrase in google, the site
is #3. I'm getting a lot of one-click orders even. Google is obviously giving the
main site a lot of juice.

I have never been a fan nor convinced of "a lot of links."

And Dburk, I get my head chopped off from certain people whenever I
emphatically state that. I got tired of arguing. There are some people who
swear the no follow adds pagerank.

Paul
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FrankBowman

14 years ago

I believe the nofollow tag only effects the passage of PageRank. As far as serps and ranking, I think the nofollow tag has very little, if any, detrimental effects............but thats just me based on my own experience.

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dburk

14 years ago

Hi friend,

Google has always crawled and indexed links tagged with the nofollow attribute. They simply do not pass PageRank or anchortext value.

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jazbo

14 years ago

My personal testing has show that nofollow links do still count in terms of building relevancy, not sure if that is through anchor text or the page the links are on however as that's been tough to quantify.

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi friend,

Google has always crawled and indexed links tagged with the nofollow attribute. They simply do not pass PageRank or anchortext value.

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Fernando Veloso

14 years ago

Originally Posted by jazbo

My personal testing has show that nofollow links do still count in terms of building relevancy, not sure if that is through anchor text or the page the links are on however as that's been tough to quantify.

Same here.

Did a test exclusively with NoFollow links and site is on top, doing well. Right now it has a mix of all kind of links BUT for months I just used NOFollow links on trusted sites within same topic.

Hard to tell what and why, but this is what happened.

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jasonl70

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Fernando Veloso

Same here.

Did a test exclusively with NoFollow links and site is on top, doing well. Right now it has a mix of all kind of links BUT for months I just used NOFollow links on trusted sites within same topic.

Hard to tell what and why, but this is what happened.

this is interesting.

maybe you just have really good onpage? I built an autoblog last winter, and it's now #5 for the KW phrase i built it around. It outranks many sites with hundreds/thousands of links, aged domains, pr3+.. and it has zero backlinks and is a pr0. I did not even really intend this site to rank - it was only going to be part of a link network!

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sqnwk 14 years ago

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi friend,

Google has always crawled and indexed links tagged with the nofollow attribute. They simply do not pass PageRank or anchortext value.

If that was the case wouldn't it help then in the search engine results?
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- dburk 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by sqnwk
  
  If that was the case wouldn't it help then in the search engine results?
  
  Hi sqnwk,
  
  No, not directly. They get you indexed but don't help you rank in the SERP. And once your page is indexed there is no longer any direct benefit from these type of links.
  
  However, any advertising and promotion of your website can have an indirect benefit. People see your ads and links and follow them to your website. If they find your website useful some may bookmark and a few may even blog about and link to your website from their blogs, forums or news websites. This type of organic backlinks can be much more valuable than your typical link building methods.
  
  Obviously the primary benefit is from targeted direct link traffic not SEO. SO with this in mind, the best links of this type are those from highly relevant pages with loads of targeted traffic.
  
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JamesF

14 years ago

I think they do give seo value, just not pagerank value.

If you are commenting on a very revelant blog or forum and leaving links; I'm sure those are weighing at least in some form..

Like with Twitter, if Google sees something retweeted a few thousand times, they will count that link and give it some weight towards you.

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John Williamson

14 years ago

They don't index all nofollow links, but you will see some counting sometimes because the spiders get 'overloaded' when crawling. They don't provide much link juice though, but it is a great way to get indexed quickly - for example, with Yahoo Answers, which is nofollow.

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themindvoid

14 years ago

i was told/taught that no follow links give no link juice.

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linderhof

14 years ago

Unfortunately, as the OP noted, "nofollow" doesn't stop Good Old Goog from following the link. Which is fine, I guess, if you have some nofollow links pointing to your site -- it demonstrates to Goog that (1) you exist and that (2) others know that you exist. What nofollow does, however, if one is to believe Chubby Cutts, is prevent PR contribution; that is, the recipient of the nofollow gets no PR-building vote from the originating page.

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psychobabble

14 years ago

I don't think its a big deal at all. Google is always hard to figure out but surely it will not make a huuge difference if they count or not.

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Groovystar

14 years ago

They index the nofollow links all right. They just don't pass PR juice from them.

nofollow is becoming so common lately I would think that going only for dofollow will create an unnatural pattern in your backlinks. That's one reason why I link wherever, even nofollow.

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timpears

14 years ago

I saw Matt Cutts tell a group once, that Google does not pay much attention to the NOFOLLOW tag. He didn't say that they don't pay attention to it, but that they don't pay MUCH attention to it.

Who knows what exactly that means. But, as indicated by this thread, evidence is showing up that they are paying some attention to links with the NOFOLLOW tag.

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Tim Pears

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TargetedTrafficSolutions

14 years ago

They still follow it, they dont count the link towards your pages PR score, but it all comes down to your sites link graph metrics overall.

Also GWMT will show some links that google both counts and does not count,
The bottom line is if the link is from a quality source your still better having it than not, and no matter what Page Rank is only one part of the Algo for your pages SERP rankings.

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olakh 14 years ago

google index the nofollw link but its will not effect on ranking
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dannybaskara

14 years ago

yes google is follow , no follow link now ><"

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dburk

14 years ago

Originally Posted by dannybaskara

yes google is follow , no follow link now ><"

Hi Danny,

Now? Yes now, as always. There is nothing new here, this is not a change by Google.

Originally Posted by timpears

I saw Matt Cutts tell a group once, that Google does not pay much attention to the NOFOLLOW tag. He didn't say that they don't pay attention to it, but that they don't pay MUCH attention to it.

Who knows what exactly that means. But, as indicated by this thread, evidence is showing up that they are paying some attention to links with the NOFOLLOW tag.

Hi Tim,

Matt has talked a lot about how Google treats the nofollow attribute. To be specific, they do follow and crawl nofollow links, but they do not pass PageRank or Anchortext value from those links.

No one here as posted anything that suggest they were able to isolate the influence of natural backlinks from artificially placed nofollow backlinks. How can you conclude that the backlinks with nofollow attributes had any influence on your ranking in the SERP?

Personally, I have found that promoting websites by posting relevant and useful comments on high traffic blogs can be effective in attracting targeted direct link traffic, completely independent from search engine traffic. This type of promotion is not affected by the nofollow attribute.

Also, I have discovered that this promotion tactic , when done well, can be a very effective method of attracting natural backlinks which have a great deal of influence on SERP rankings. While my nofollow backlinks had no direct influence on SERP rankings, they did play a role in acquiring natural backlinks, which had a direct influence on SERP rankings.

Here's how nofollow links on blog comments lead to SERP rankings:

Useful Nofollow Comment Links + Relevant High Traffic Blogs = Targeted Traffic ->
Targeted traffic + Useful Content = Natural Backlinks ->
Natural Backlinks + Optimized Content = SERP Ranking

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jacksonlin

14 years ago

There has been a lot of speculation as to whether or not no follow links get followed or not.

I believe that although they say you don't get link juice, I have heard from many trust gurus and other sources that they do give you link juice. Well some anyway.

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Happyeagle

14 years ago

From my experience, it seems like no follow links do not pass page rank, but the anchor text will count. With google its tough to tell.

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jasonl70

14 years ago

How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute | Search Engine Journal

According to that, google's official stance is that it ignores EVERYTHING regarding a nofollow link if it points to an external domain.. it doesn't follow it, it ignores the anchor text, etc.

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Adam Roy

14 years ago

Tell me how this works...

How did google webaster tools tell me I had duplicate meta tags when they were meta tags of the advertisers site I directed to with a nofollow link.

I link to 3 seperate product pages of my particular advertiser's site to promote 3 DIFFERENT products. The advertiser's site had duplicate description tags, and one other had a "short" description tag, I got penalized for all 3.

It took me like 2 weeks to work it out and get the errors out of my webmaster tools...

Any thoughts on that?

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charto911

14 years ago

matt cutts has specifically said that they just dont pass anchor and page value

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Daniel Deegan

14 years ago

Think of it like this. No follow may not be good for the passing of page rank. But google has other key metrics such as relevancy, authority and trust which are used to calculate a sites overall value and/or ranking. My guess is no follow links will still pass those other metrics as some sort of weighting factor in the search algorithm even though they don't pass PR.

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jaaproos

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Daniel Deegan

Think of it like this. No follow may not be good for the passing of page rank. But google has other key metrics such as relevancy, authority and trust which are used to calculate a sites overall value and/or ranking. My guess is no follow links will still pass those other metrics as some sort of weighting factor in the search algorithm even though they don't pass PR.

Thanks, I heard this before and with all the anecdotal evidence I think you have come up with a good explanation...

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IntegratedS

14 years ago

According to seo it's really good if Google is counting the no follow links...It will help a lot in link building process...

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timpears

14 years ago

Besides everything stated above, you need to have NOFOLLOW links for your sites, otherwise your backlink campaign will not look very natural. And, doesn't it need to be natural, otherwise Google will devalue it, will they not?

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Tim Pears

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Groovystar

14 years ago

All the more reason to take any link you can get and not be picky! As long as they are authentic.

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4morereferrals

14 years ago

I have located a plentiful source of nofollow link sites that may be useful for a test.

The best would be decent wp blogs where comments are set to noFollow.

The reason I havent tested this :

A - who has the time

B - a reliable source of 1 way nofollow links

C - a significant controllable environ to give it a legit go that would have merit.

I shall play ... and see ...

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VizFact

14 years ago

Originally Posted by 4morereferrals

I have located a plentiful source of nofollow link sites that may be useful for a test.

The best would be decent wp blogs where comments are set to noFollow.

The reason I havent tested this :

A - who has the time

B - a reliable source of 1 way nofollow links

C - a significant controllable environ to give it a legit go that would have merit.

I shall play ... and see ...

I sign up for that thar thingy in yer sig. Tell me, is it worth it ?

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VizFact

14 years ago

Wow, as a new member, I can attest to the fact that this is one of the most informative online portals I have EVER come across, with regard to SEO and online marketing. As of the posting of this reply, I am no longer worried about follow vs no-follow, thanks for resolving this minor concern of mine.

Cheers !

Thanks

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Is Google now following NOFOLLOW links now and then?

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