Howie says "nofollow" doesn't matter!

I don't see how nofollows are still followed, but I do know that it helps from following duplicate content. I don't see how a nofollow would hurt rankings because as far as I know as long as you link out "it counts"
Howie does know what he's talking about though. Just saw him this weekend at Gateway to Wealth.

Was always under the impression that nofollow links are kinda ignored by SE's... n I know Howie knows his stuff.... so was wondering...

no.. but what Howie is talking about is "rankings" that have come from these nofollow links... from what i know... i think he means SE traffic... not what comes from the individual website's visitors...

***** Listen up....

I can't go into the history of this but I was one of a small group of people who discovered this FIRST. I became acquainted with someone who first created programs that would post comment links to Blogger blogs.

At the time, Google was the first SE to claim it honored NoFollow tags but our links in the comment section of Blogger-only blogs still got us top rankings in Google for our keywords. The only catch was that it took 3-4 weeks for high positions to be reached in Google but a mere 3-14 days for high positions to be reached for the same keywords in YAHOO (because, at the time they weren't honoring NoFollow).

Black Hatters everywhere came out like hornets to claim that we were full of crap and lying, that "nofollow" meant NOFOLLOW, period. Honestly, I lost so much respect for these alleged know-it-alls discussing things on their "elite" forums from their limited perspective as if there was absolutely "no way possible" we could be achieving results by doing what we were saying we were doing.

Yet, we continued to get results.

Debates ensued. All kinds of people began investigating and they still couldn't fathom how we were doing it.

What we discovered, however, (and this is not meant to be technically precise), is that, somehow, when the SEs indexed, and/or scraped, each other, a high ranking in one would influence a higher ranking in the other.

So when our links hit the Top of Yahoo, Google was then giving weight to the YAHOO ranking of our sites rather than just seeing our backlinks on Bloggers' "nofollow" blog comments (the 1000s of backlinks on Blogger still helped because people clicking on them and visiting our site out of curiousity also added weight).

What I learned a long time ago is that when you throw enough links out there, they start getting picked up and mashed around in so many ways unexpected and unintended.

In this particular instance, there are probably still some SEs that don't honor NoFollow tag and if, and when, they are indexed, or scraped, or *whatever*, some of that weight inevitably carries over to the SEs that do honor the nofollow tag.

If this does not make sense to anyone, then please ask your question as precisely as possible and I will do my best answer it.

Eric

First of all, if he said they get followed and help the rankings - that doesn't fit your title ("nofollow doesn't matter").

I know that they get followed by Google. I haven't tested properly if they help because that's harder to test.

Milan.... nofollow doesnt matter - meant that it didn't matter in terms of getting rankings... as opposed to "followed" links.... - nothing misleading about that

"Nofollow" is an HTML tag that was created to help search engines combat link spam. Link spammers would use programs that automatically found places to spam their links and this would cause the search engines to give them higher rankings.

But now, if a site uses "nofollow" tags, then any links that fall in between the nofollow tags (like in blogger comment sections, for example) won't be given any "weight" in the search rankings. Many have had issue that "NoFollow" should have been called, "NoWeight" because the Se's DO follow the links they just don't give them any "weight"

That doesn't mean the search engine won't INDEX the link. It can still appear in the search engine. And the search engine might still even spider it but the link won't add to the site's search engine ranking.

Long ago, Yahoo did not honor the NoFollow tag so you could link spam places like Blogger comment sections (which had nofollow tags) but Yahoo would still honor the spam links and give them high rankings. When Google Indexed Yahoo, your site would then be treated as a YAHOO listing and not just as some spam link in a Blogger comment section.

Anyways, it's my impression that Yahoo signed on to NoFollow eventually or else everyone would be either raving, or complaining, about it. There are plenty of 3rd party apps that now allow users to choose whether or not they want to have nofollow tags on their blogs/sites.

Hence the confusion of the term "NoFollow" which would have been better named, "NoWeight" because the SEs DO follow and INDEX links surrounded by "NoFollow" tags... they just don't give them any weight in the ranking structure.

But, if one SE indexes/scrapes ANOTHER SE that IGNORES NoFollow, then the spammed links are no longer couched in NoFollow tags but rather are treated as prominent listings in another SE. Sweet, huh?

It's a clever idea but it wouldn't stay private long.

The whole no follow thing is just a joke. It was implemented 5 years ago to STOP SPAM. It didn't work and now people are building unnatural amounts of links. Search engines want to see mix. It shows a little more natural behavior.

BizBoost.... makes good sense.... tell us more..

shhhhhhh...

BigBoost... you've cleared a lot of the confusion! Thanks!

Warning Caveman explanation to follow:

The only time I've ever had a link work as a "No-Follow" was when I accidently screwed up the url and any visitor clicking received file not found - then it truly was "No-Follow" because I lost the visitors that wanted to get to my site....lol

Tim

Keith... i loved ur auto pilot blog method.....(still makin me money..) n now more frm u!! Thanks to all.... i'm learning more from this post than i've in a while now..!!

I just checked this in my Google Webmaster tools, under Links/Pages with external links.

I checked a bunch of those pages and found my link with the nofollow tag. Why would Google list it if it didn't matter? Many of the pages were blogs that had my articles and resource box link. Everything was intact as it should be, except the link was changed to nofollow.

-Ken

Good to know about this "no follow" thing.

By the way guys, Devon Brown(Renegade Success) is A DYNAMITE...he is sooo fun and cool. I met him at the Gateway seminar and he rocks. I wish I could dance like him lol

Thanks for the enjoyable time that you gave us at the Gateway Seminar!

As far as I understood nofollow doesnt help with serps.

I have always questioned & considered the fact that it has some effects. I believe they will eventually need to do something about nofollow as more and more webmasters use them. I mean imagine if everything went nofollow tomorrow. Then they would need to redo their algorithm.

FWIW when the whole nofollow thing came out, I was under the impression it was an attempting to combat pageRANK manipulation. Back then there were a lot of people trying to buy and/or scheme pagerank (the silly little green bar of Google's, NOT the serps) Some of you probably remember pagerank stealing, and how Google's own pagerank was stolen.

I found it kind of amusing that everyone immediately started thinking it would somehow prevent sites from getting spidered, indexed or ranked in serps

I know a guy who pays good $$$ for .edu links regardless of if they're nofollow or not, and he doesn't really care whether any of his links are follow or nofollow. And he's not exactly broke.

I've always kind of wondered if Google made went after people who sell "dofollow" text links in part because these sellers were moving in on Adwords territory.

Also, next time Google updates its Page Rank, pay attention to what other updates or changes it rolls out. Most people don't--they're too busy having their buttons pushed over their sites' new Google PR numbers.