The nofollow link attribute has been introduced by Google in the year 2005. It is intended to reduce link spamming in blogs and the well known online communities. The rel=nofollow should prevent search engines from following those links. Some webmasters might have found out that nofollow links will help your search engine rankings. The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow link.
A link with rel=nofollow looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>
Now the question is: Do links count with the nofollow attribute or not?
This month, a webmaster of a game community site did a test. He made an article about the game Spiderman 3 in one of his blogs and added comments in other blogs. The comments on the other blogs contained links to his Spiderman 3 article. He used the anchor text “piderman 3″ (no mistake here) and a nofollow attribute.
After a couple of days his article ranked first on Google for “piderman 3″. But does this mean Google counts nofollow links? Some people think that this experiment might prove that Google counts nofollow links. But, a few factors can also influence the ranking of the article:
- “piderman 3″ appears on the page as a part of “Spiderman 3″. This means that the article can also rank because of the words in the article. The article was posted on a blog so the keyword also appears in the website navigation.
- Google does not only search for the direct keyword occurencs on articles. Google also searches for misspelled versions of keywords.
If you search on Google for “piderman 3″, Google will ask you “Did you mean Spiderman 3?”. Google knows the correct term that you were looking for.
This little experiment cannot prove if Google counts the nofollow links or not. The outcome is not good enough.
However, it is indisputable that links are extremely important to get high rankings on Google. To get high rankings on Google and other major search engines, it is important to have both optimized web page content and good inbound links.
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May 29th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Nomar, do you have any ‘nofollow’ settings on Comments or the Top Commentators sections of this site?
May 29th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
They are automaticly in the comments. But the Top Commentators are without the nofollow tag ofcourse
May 29th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
WOW! Food for thought…… If it’s on the money than maybe I will turn the damn spell check off for a while. Maybe I can discuss “how to get numbr 1″ on the google homepage? ? ?
Ok probably not.
Great post.
Maybe you can help me turn the no follow off? ? ?
May 29th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Hmm…I was thinking about that post when you acctually posted it! read the experiment today…but I think Google follows no-follow also…but it seems the authority and the PR is not taken…and this change seems to have happened only days back. like I had about 800-900 results for the term “theanand” and suddenly it has rose to 10k plus…what can this mean?
May 29th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
and btw nomar, your no-follow on top commentators seems not to be working…i cudnt find a link back to my blog
May 29th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
One interesting side-note is that Yahoo and MSN really don’t care about ‘nofollows’ at all. It’s solely a Google thing.
It seems that Google is only discounting ‘nofollows’, but not disqualifying them…
May 29th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Anand, The links in the top commentators list are no follow, im sure.
Stephen, you dont want to turn off the no follow. Then your featured links will not get the pagerank the deserve. Outgoing links also counts you know…
May 30th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Thanks for helping me clarify ….
June 11th, 2007 at 4:58 am
I have to say that Courtney Tuttle’s points are right. It seems that other search engines are more fair on what they allow and what they don’t allow. It is pretty impressive because I think people get too stuck on just google traffic and they forget about other search engines.
June 30th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
I´ve never tought about this technique. I’ll try on my blog.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:04 am
The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.
i think it helps indexing