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No Follow Bleed Through - Fact or Fiction?

by The Expert
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I recently read an article, blog post, or forum post that alluded to the fact that google is selective in the way that it treats No Follow links. Much to my frustration, I can't seem to be able to find it anymore.

The theme of the article was that google will sometimes choose to ignore the "No Follow" attribute of some links and count them as traditional links as it sees fit.

It led one to believe that links on authority sites were often treated this way.

It seems to make sense to me. The whole No Follow thing is really just a voluntary thing after all. There's nothing that can "force" any search engine to hand links in a certain way just by adding a label to it any more than you can prevent a search engine spider from reviewing a page with your robots.txt file.

Anyway, does anyone have any info on this concept? I'd like to research it further, but am drawing blanks and searching for it is just pulling up hords of general SEO content.
#bleed #fact #fiction #follow
  • Profile picture of the author bgmacaw
    Some people insist that 'no follow' means that the Google 'bot doesn't follow the link at all. This is, after all, based on a statement by Matt Cutts so there is some authority behind it and this seems to be the 'official' word from Google.

    However, others have noted that nofollow links from certain sites seem to get new content indexed quickly and that nofollow links from authority sites, like Wikipedia, seem to be followed by the 'bot and perhaps even counted like standard links.

    Bottom line, only search engineers at Google know for sure but the actual answer seems to be more complicated than a simple off/on switch as has been suggested.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jenie0109
    it's a Myth.. Look at Yahoo! Answers , it is not dofollow but it is one of the great ways to increase your PR, SERP , and Traffic
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  • Profile picture of the author mattinertia
    Nofollow links are ignored completely by Google when it decides rankings and they dont follow them. However Google does still cache them - hence the reason they appear in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

    Try it for yourself. Create a new page with no links to it apart from a few nofollow links from yahoo answers, blog comments or wherever you want. I did this about 12 months ago and the page still isnt indexed. Thus prooving that Google does not follow the link!
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  • Profile picture of the author Smokey_Joe
    This topic is actually an intensely debated one, as more and more people report the persistence with which nofollow backlinks keep showing up in google backlink lists. There are two possible explanations to that: either google are changing their stance on the whole nofollow business (hugely unlikely, if you ask me), or they are changing their stance on what links get displayed (are these a random selection, do they belong to a particular type, or are these that are deemed most relevant) - this one seems valid enough.

    An important thing to note here is that nofollow links are in fact followed (i.e. crawled and stuff), whereas the catch consists in their not transferring anchor text and pagerank data to the page linked to. Therefore, it is quite logical for these to appear in yahoo site explorer and google, but the question is how important they are deemed by the SEs.
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