The NOFOLLOW Mythology
Posted 11th February 2012 at 11:36 AM by pbarnhart
From a comment I made in a WF discussion.
Ord Allenbea's conclusion about quality content is dead-on. But the first statement about follow and nofollow is a fast-growing and erroneous statement. Per Google:
Set aside for a moment that tests to confirm this are easy to perform - I myself have run three tests for large clients confirming the indexing outcomes. Google does parse compiled Flash for links. Google does parse javascript for links. Google will index HTML pages with no inbound anchor links if it appears in the XML sitemap or RSS feed. Google does follow links found in PDF files and Word documents. Google does not follow or index rel=nofollow links. Think for one moment why we should believe Google on this.
Google is going through serious anti-trust investigations in both the USA and the EU. Bing is just one major search provider fighting them. Search engines in Russia and China are also part of these investigations. This above quoted material is part of Google's support content and an extension of their terms and conditions. If this was not true and Google deliberately did use these links for indexing, this would actually be criminal conduct under USA FTC and EU law. Bing, Yandex, and others would be presenting this publicly to both investigation teams. Google is so paranoid about this that they deindexed their own browser for violation of the paid links provision. They will do nothing that contradicts their own terms, conditions, and technical guidance because the legal consequences could be severe.
Correlation does not imply causation. This is the hardest statement of science for humans to understand, since our brains are wired to see causation at the slightest correlation. Throwing up a bunch of nofollow links then seeing your site index does not mean one caused the other.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ord Allenbea 
One: The follow / no follow means nothing at all and you still get credit for the link. This is one of those myths started by SEO people to sell their services.
Quote:
In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways. {http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569}
Google is going through serious anti-trust investigations in both the USA and the EU. Bing is just one major search provider fighting them. Search engines in Russia and China are also part of these investigations. This above quoted material is part of Google's support content and an extension of their terms and conditions. If this was not true and Google deliberately did use these links for indexing, this would actually be criminal conduct under USA FTC and EU law. Bing, Yandex, and others would be presenting this publicly to both investigation teams. Google is so paranoid about this that they deindexed their own browser for violation of the paid links provision. They will do nothing that contradicts their own terms, conditions, and technical guidance because the legal consequences could be severe.
Correlation does not imply causation. This is the hardest statement of science for humans to understand, since our brains are wired to see causation at the slightest correlation. Throwing up a bunch of nofollow links then seeing your site index does not mean one caused the other.
Total Comments 1
Comments
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I think nofollow is about not passing page rank and not to say 'do not index this link'. Google still index nofollow links but do not consider them for PR.
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Thanks
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