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Does Google Follow the Nofollow?
Posted on February 16, 2007 - Filed Under Tips |
Ever wonder how Google treats the nofollow tag or heard conflicting views on the subject?
In the following image you see (in pink) a nofollow tagged link to Webmaster Central Blog that I made in a post titled “When was the last time you checked your links?”
If you go to the post I linked to on Webmaster Central and look at the bottom of that page they show “Links to this post:” correct? If Googlebot followed the nofollow “When was the last time you checked your links?” should appear in that area but it doesn’t. That’s right, Google did not follow the link just as Adam Lasnik from Google clearly states here.
So there you have it, proof and words directly from someone who works for Google, who do you trust? :)
Similar Post:
- When was the last time you checked your links?
- Loss of the ability to pass pagerank
- Deindexed from Google
February 16th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Ah, another claim from Google along those lines! How disappointing - this was not how it was supposed to work. It was originally set up to be ‘put no weight on this link’ or ‘no vote for the destination is implied by this link’
Google has changed it completely, if Matt and Adam know what they are talking about (and I certainly hope they do!)
(A similar cite to your Adam quote from Matt at:
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/11634
‘If you wanted to sculpt where Googlebot was going to prevent Googlebot from crawling the printer-friendly pages, you might use nofollow on internal links then. ‘)
I wonder why Google made this change? Did they just get confused by the poor name chosen, or was there a distinct decision made?
February 17th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Seems Google’s going to evolve nofollow. Tomorrow nofollow just means what it says, and next week we get a useful microformat. Wishful thinking? Read this post: http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-going-to-revamp-relnofollow.html
February 17th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Lea - Don’t expect Google to ever stick with the plan, they are a dynamic company though it would be good press if they let this be known from time to time.
Think about it, optimizers naturally try to get as much out of search engine rankings as we can. When we find a new hole it is patched, this sometimes requires that current things are changed while they build a stronger algorithm.
The nofollow tag is a bandaid for PayPerSpam and paid links, if people don’t use them they lose the ability to pass pagerank or worse.
Like it or not… it is true.
February 17th, 2007 at 8:01 am
I’m running my own public experiment right now as well, hopefully no one links to the page for the test. But as the good engineer that I am, I’ve got some controls running privately as well. I’ll let you know what I find, so far snap and yahoo have already crawled it less than 12 hours since it went live.
February 17th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I know, but it seems … wrong (I won’t go so far as to use the ‘e’ word on this one :)) that they agree to use a standard, help to define the standard and then mutate the standard unilaterally.
I wouldn’t mind so much if they even defined clearly somewhere how it worked, rather than relying on us to follow blogs and forums to pick up how they are changing the rules this week :(
I’m a programmer at root - I want my interfaces with foreign systems clearly documented :(
(This comment may be incoherent due to the poster having a shocking cold - sorry! It looks ok…)
February 17th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
That has also been my complaint as well Lea.
February 18th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
With Google’s new Link tab in the Webmaster page, I have seen pages there that I know have a “nofollow” tag on them from Yahoo! Answers, but Google is listing them as a link to my client’s website. Google follow them, the link just doesn’t carry any weight.
Matt Cutts confirms this in his post on the new links tool: “- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. :)”