There seems to be a common misconception in the webmaster and search engine marketing field that inbound links which use the ‘no follow’ attribute have no value to the site which they point towards.
Earlier in the week, Raj Dash commented in a post on Exposing the Invisible Web to Search Engines that in addition to bookmarking and social news sharing, securing links from authority sites such as Wikipedia can help search engines discover sites which they may not have been able to find.
A reader responded in a comment that this is false:
Links from Wikipedia will not allow you pages to be seen by search engines, because Wikipedia recently added rel=”nofollow” to all of there external links.
Instead of challenging the reader to an argument on No Follow, I thought that for once and for all, the law needs to be laid down as to how search engines treat the no follow attribute in terms of linking and discovery.
What better way to do so than to ask the search engines themselves? So I wrote Google’s Adam Lasnik (Matt’s on vacation), Yahoo’s Director of Search Tim Mayer and the Ask.com Search Team to get the lowdown on No Follow directly from the source.
So, here are the basic No Follow questions and answers, from Google, Ask.com (a surprising response) and Yahoo.
1. How does your search engine treat the No Follow attribute?
- Google : The Googlebot does not follow that link.
- Yahoo : If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.
- Ask.com : We have never officially supported No Follow, so your questions don’t apply to our crawler/ranking.
2. If a site has no web citations and only has one link pointing to it, and that link is from a Wikipedia entry, would your search engine find that site and index it even though the link uses a No Follow attribute?
- Yahoo : Yes, the link is available to our crawlers for finding the target. Then the target will be crawled and indexed based on our algorithms.
- Google : Assuming that link is still no-followed per Wikipedia’s current practice, we will not find much less index that page (remember, this is page, not site related; if links to other pages on that site are not no-followed, we will see and potentially index those pages).
On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.
3. Is there any quality given to sites which attract No Follow links from authority sites, besides the lack of the passing of PageRank, Link Authority or “Search Juice”?
- Google : Since the Googlebot does not follow no-follow links, this isn’t really an issue.
- Yahoo : As promised in the semantics for the ‘no follow’ tag, the anchor text and attribution will not be carried over to the target of a ‘no follow’ link.
In conclusion, the commenter was correct about links to pages from Wikipedia some search engines, specifically Google, but Yahoo and Ask.com both not only follow No Follow, but also make those sites available to their algorithm. Therefore, even links with the No Follow attribute do have value; especially in the counting, but not always authoritative measurement, of backlinks.
No Follow does not mean that search engines do not see the pages which No Follow attributed links point to, it means in some cases (not Ask.com) link value nor referral attribution is given.
Comments
112 responses so far ↓
Sebastian on Apr 27, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Great job, thanks!
Didn’t you ask MSN or didn’t you expect that they can remember that they officially support the rel-nofollow microformat since 2005?
Raj Dash on Apr 27, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Hey Loren, thanks for looking into this. It confirms my suspicion. What better way to prove something?!
Humans for Lunch on Apr 27, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Nice job, surprised you got such a concrete answer from them. But it raises one issue - people could use wikipedia to put in spam pages and although it doesn’t get any credit to those sites, it still helps it get indexed by Yahoo and Ask..hmm I predict a surge in spam on Wikipedia.
Joe Mulloy on Apr 28, 2007 at 12:33 am
“but Yahoo and Ask.com both not only follow No Follow, but also make those sites available to their algorithm.”
This has to be one of the most confusing thing I’ve ever read.
Was it supposed to be “both not only NOT follow No Follow, but…”
The wording makes it seem like they do adhere to No Follow
DotSauce Domain Magazine on Apr 28, 2007 at 12:46 am
Wow! Great information, thank you very much for contacting the big guys. Bookmarking this, I will most likely be referencing this in my own article soon.
Mark
Julio Nobrega on Apr 28, 2007 at 1:11 am
Yahoo has the best attitude here. Google just doesn’t “follow” the link, but if it’s present on any other page, it’ll crawl the page. That’s stupid, because it does nothing, all you need is one link to defeat every nofollow’ed reference. Unless Google hid if they consider the link for PR purposes, unlike Yahoo, who were explicit on their answers about this.
A link is a link is a link, better have it even if it’s nofollow. I would rather hit Digg’s frontpage with nofollow than getting thousands of links from untrusted, PR 1 pages.
Barry on Apr 28, 2007 at 1:36 am
I’ve touted what Lasnik was saying for a while now but I have to ask, why in the heck is it still including in the backlink results?
SearchEngineChannel on Apr 28, 2007 at 3:59 am
Thanks for clearing this up Loren, but as Sebastian said, any reason why you didn’t ask MSN?
cdc on Apr 28, 2007 at 4:42 am
Your findings align with an experiment I conducted a few months ago:
http://www.wagerank.com/2007/the-nofollow-experiment/
Keith on Apr 28, 2007 at 5:23 am
Well done on that interview. At least I feel I have a clearer idea on how various search engines, particular Google index my sites.
Loren Baker, Editor on Apr 28, 2007 at 8:07 am
Pinged MSN Search for this information, but did not hear back in a timely fashion. I will retry and once we hear back from them, will update.
Rafael Sosa on Apr 28, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Whenever I think of rel-nofollow, I think of the requests by webmasters asking to have a way to link to a website, without transferring any value, because they were usually talking about a bad source. Thus, the purpose of no-follow, in much sense, is to keep from passing value to unwanted sites. I think this attribute is very limiting, and more attributes should be created.
Specifically, I want a rel-paidlink attribute to identify links that have been purchased. This attribute, unlike the non-specific rel-nofollow attribute, can inform the crawler of the paid link status on the link, allowing the system crawling to determine what to do with that new information.
Aftseo on Apr 28, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Google does follow “nofollows”, set up a page on your site with no interlinking within your site, point 10 “nofollows at it” wait 2 weeks, go back search in google, and it will be indexed.
Shelley on Apr 28, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Aftseo, is the page dynamically generated? Or static? I am assuming from the behavior you described that the page was a static object in a web accessible subdirectory, in which case it would be picked up.
Zohaib on Apr 29, 2007 at 1:50 am
Good Information about nofollow.
Zarathustra on Apr 29, 2007 at 2:44 pm
If I’m in the place of the search engines or wikipedia… I’ll stick with nofollow. It’ll be devastating on the system.
However, that DOFollow thing that is getting popular (for blogs) might as well be good and be bad.
Andrea on Apr 29, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Loren.
Whats the bottom line?
Are we or are we not getting credits for these comments ?
:)
Good work. Just a few hours before reading this post I added the plugin allowing links to be followed from my site. I figure reward the visitors and take my chances… for now.
Matt Keegan on Apr 29, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Thank you for bringing clarity to an issue that has caused confusion for some time.
I recently joined the “Do/I Follow” movement and have seen traffic increase to my blog accordingly. Hopefully, this move will translate to better link juice on the part of all participants.
Fred Black on Apr 29, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Great Post. Just last week I posted an article on my blog titled I’ve Removed The ‘No Follow’ Tag from My Blog - You Should Too!.
Take Care,
Fred
Mukesh on Apr 30, 2007 at 4:45 am
Is there a possibility to put a nofollow for external links using HTaccess? I know this question is not related but I jst wanted to know and would appreciate a post on this. I have many sites linking to me, but I am not sure if my pages are getting crawled by the bots. Also is there a way to check HTaccess tags of other sites?
Mike Burns on Apr 30, 2007 at 4:59 am
So, now that we know how the NOFOLLOW is treated by the bots, how are they (mis)treating the NOINDEX attribute?
David Dalka on Apr 30, 2007 at 6:51 am
Loren,
Nice post on an undercovered topic!
Michael Duz on Apr 30, 2007 at 7:42 am
I wrote this up in detail last year http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php and also included the results for MSN.
- Michael
Nirupam Roy on Apr 30, 2007 at 7:42 am
Hi
Very nice post. Very much informative.
Eagerly waiting to know how MSN reacts to it.
Cheers
Nirupam
London SEO on Apr 30, 2007 at 8:22 am
I could swear i’ve seen Google reporting on links with “nofollow” for ours as well as our clients’ sites in their Webmaster Central link report.
John Carcutt on Apr 30, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Thanks for the article Loren, Great to get the whole picture in one clean package. Good job. Required reading for my team.
Janet Martin on Apr 30, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Loren, thanks so much for this! It’s exactly the info I was looking for. Consider yourself delicioused. Cheers!
Rani Raj on Apr 30, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Very much informative.
Anil Kumar Singh on May 1, 2007 at 2:00 am
This is not good news for link exchange marketer. Do you think that if search engine will not index that URL then why link exchange expert will visit any blogs, social networking website or wiki site for link posting, if that is not useful. This will affect Page Hit also for that specific website if no buddy is posting any link or making comment on your post.
David Gregory on May 1, 2007 at 8:32 am
No-follow “inlinks” are displayed in Yahoo Site Explorer. so there is some recognition…
Loren on May 1, 2007 at 8:57 am
@David, yes, as stated in the pice Yahoo follows links using the no follow attribute but does not pass value from the page which is linking to a specific site. So, of course the links show up in Site Explorer, but should not influence ranking.
Allen on May 1, 2007 at 10:20 am
If Yahoo and Ask follow them and index those sites, won’t Google then index them by finding the links on Yahoo and Ask? If that’s the case, then the nofollow attribute is useless with respect to indexing.
michael wilson seo on May 1, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Wikipedia now adds the “nofollow” attribute to all external links. The reason given for this is to battle spam links, like those of blackhat search engine optimizers. The change is already active, as you can see by checking outgoing links on Wikipedia’s articles.
Web Page
Thank for the official response. Official is always good. Nice leg work Loren.
michael wilson seo on May 1, 2007 at 8:36 pm
oopsa i meant to show the tag ;-)
a href=”http://www.website.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Visit My Page
Kyle M. Brown on May 1, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Allen makes a very good point. If Yahoo is following and indexing links despite the No Follow tags. These same links will be indexed by Google and MSN via a Yahoo spidering and the No Follow tag becomes a none issue.
As long as one major search engine ignores No Follow tags, they are technically not working.
SEO Consultant India on May 2, 2007 at 10:52 am
Good to see such a detailed post on nofollow.
4engr on May 5, 2007 at 3:02 am
Whats about the page rank of google if no follow link is there?
Respiro, the logo designer on May 5, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Mr. Baker, thank you for this article which [in part] clarifies the “no follow” tag’s role.
Lisa on May 9, 2007 at 12:56 am
Great post! Thanks for the information. I have been more than a little confused as to how the whole no follow/do follow thing worked.
Clickfire on May 10, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Loren, thanks for getting the SE’s on record for this.
Notebook Fixer on May 11, 2007 at 12:49 am
Thank you for this article, really good stuff. Worth reading.
Joerg Petermann on May 13, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Thanks for the facts, wish I’d never seen nofollow.
Hope to have a better time without such crazy solutions.
Paul Easton on May 18, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Good Post and great information- love it when its backed up with facts! -Not opinions.
I like the “expiring no follow links” -concept -as will allow webmasters that are serious- to post-thinking long term…..
Wiki had to try and stop abuse- so it made sense to go no follow - Someone should look at the traffic stats from no follow links (as isn’t that what you are really after- more traffic after all?)
Bob Crain on May 21, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Great article and thank you for taking the time to interview these authorities.
I would like to see some test results displaying pages with no other links but those with no follow attributes…
Also thanks for clearing up why you didn’t include MSN, I was wondering why they were not included also.
SEOZ87 on May 22, 2007 at 2:27 am
Great Research! i used this content on my website too if you don’t mind Loren. Plus one thing i want to tell is that GOOGLE does FOLLOW no-follow link. I have prove of it. I am analyzing a site links in google where i find a link to that site from a directory when i visit that directory ,interestingly its using NO FOLLOW tags.
:)
Tech Duke on Jun 2, 2007 at 6:00 pm
It would be really good, if you included Windows Live search with the comparison. Live search have much more search market share then Ask.
Kevin on Dec 5, 2007 at 1:20 am
And ask.com wonders why no one takes them seriously …
vince on Dec 26, 2007 at 2:25 am
what is the requirements for live.com for linking?
Benj Arriola on Dec 27, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Somehow… I still have doubts. I always perceived Google to crawl but not credit the link love from a nofollow. So it may still help in the indexing but not helping in the ranking.
I’ll test this with a page unknown the world and just link to it from a nofollow link.
Paul from SEO Training Live on Dec 27, 2007 at 11:05 pm
You would be better using a site map program like this one: http://www. xml-sitemaps.com and it will automatically index the new page
Getting indexed is not a challenge
Bradman on Jan 7, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Does a no follow tag keep the crawler on your site with the result of more pages being indexed or reindexed.
Also does activating no follow help you achieve a higher pagerank, It seams that a site owner can put more links on thei site or blog without fear of being penalized for to many outgoing links, If in fact you are penalized. Just seams that those with the power have figured out how to keep those without from getting any.
Justin Jung on Jan 8, 2008 at 11:54 pm
If a web page needs to have a lot of outbound links, they can be affected to PR. In this case, no follows might be helpful! - I think.
CBR on Jan 18, 2008 at 2:07 am
The traffic I get from Yahoo and Ask is so minimal I don’t even bother wondering what their alog does.. G just buries all the rest of them
bob on Jan 21, 2008 at 2:11 am
Google owns about 60% of the search engine market and continue to grow. Yahoo has good content such as news and their own information but google is the king of search engines
SEO Web Design on Jan 22, 2008 at 8:51 am
Nofollow attribute does not really apply to the other search engines. This attribute is simply part of Google’s plan against link spamming and PR manipulation.
Andrew Jensen on Jan 24, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Interesting article-I’ll admit I learned something about Ask. Wonder if they will ever come around full circle and accept the no follow?
San Diego SEO on Jan 24, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I think this debate continues to prove that no link is a bad link - void of adult, non related sites, etc. I know many people who steer clear of linking with no-follow sites simply because of the no-follow. I’m still not completely convinced that, if it is an ‘authority’ site, Google completely discredits the link if it is tagged with a ‘nofollow’.
Tony on Jan 25, 2008 at 4:30 am
Reading through the article and subsequent comments, I think I am now safe in the knowledge that all my “find ‘nofollow’ blogs for comments” software rubbish has been pretty useless and can well and truly be confined to the recycle bin!
Paul from SEO Training Live on Jan 25, 2008 at 1:32 pm
This is good article which I have been following.
It can be abused- thats where the lack of no follow creates more work.
Let me explain…..
On my dog site: http://www.JustDogClothes.com/
The competition has made 28 K links to it for the term of “dog clothes” - 99% of them are from blogs without the no follow- some of them in english- most in chinese (I believe most don’t require confirmation)
(They have a number 1 ranking BTW)
I am all for posts on blogs with relevent content(like this one) but when it gets abused like this- its possible for anybody to apply it to any market and you cant remove them from the top position (even with a complain to the big G)
Comments?
North Carolina Graphic Design on Jan 25, 2008 at 9:18 pm
@Paul from SEO Training Live - I have seen the same exact thing from an advertising company in CA. They have hundreds of links from dofollow blogs using only the anchor text: ‘internet marketing’ and rank rather well for the extremely competitive term. The worst part - they sell SEO. Is this the same tactic they use for their clients?
I clicked through to a few and a couple were from a ‘business ethics’ blog - the irony.
Paul from SEO Training Live on Jan 26, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Hi to the north carolina Graphic design -are you able to tell me the site? or tell me its rank- I want to look into it more….
Paul
North Carolina Graphic Design on Jan 26, 2008 at 5:30 pm
@Paul - Sure I would be happy to disclose more although a more private setting might ideal as opposed to a blog forum:) Feel free to e-mail me at jclark (at) andrusgroup.com. I just dropped the URL into Yahoo Site Explorer - 17,000 plus links most of which are from BS.
Image Marketing Consultants - Full Service Marketing / Advertising on Jan 28, 2008 at 11:30 am
Nice report… Being in the business of marketing, advertising, and SEO, I can tell you that the best way to obtain a higher PR is through quality backlinks (obviously), however we have always maintained that even a nofollow link is better than no link at all…
Funzig web design Blackburn, Ribble Valley, Lancashire on Jan 29, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Nice article - guess I need to go experiment a bit…
Mark (Private Label Articles) on Feb 2, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Even though Google doesn’t follow the links, they can still get you visitors. So don’t worry too much about it.
Internet earning guide on Feb 8, 2008 at 1:15 am
thank god for this article, I was getting suspicious after submitting my site to various directories, because not many backlinks are found when I do a search. I think the no follow attribute is just heinous
Paul from SEO Training Live on Feb 8, 2008 at 7:02 am
Hiya,
Google can be slow in reconizing back links. Have you used this tool:
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm
Shows more and is helpful
Paul
Drug Awareness Information on Feb 11, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Someone commented - No-follow “inlinks” are displayed in Yahoo Site Explorer. So there is some recognition…
I have noticed this too with some Yahoo Answers I posted - which are nofollow links but seem to get some recognition in Yahoo. Whether this is because it is their own site, or whether it is because they still rate nofollow links to some degree, I’m not certain.
Shayne on Feb 11, 2008 at 7:03 pm
As this post approaches being 12 months old is the information still relevant today.
or have there been dramatic changes in the past 10 months. Have Google, Yahoo or Ask changed their view on the “no-follow” tag
Regards Shayne
tercüme on Feb 21, 2008 at 7:19 am
Nice article - guess I need to go experiment a bit..
Colin on Mar 12, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Thanks. I have spent the last week thinking about this and wondering whether to trawl my sites adding no follows to unimportant links. I maaaay still do this on the main sites, but I feel it is less urgent now.
John Illnes on Apr 10, 2008 at 2:19 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….
BartTheBeear on Apr 17, 2008 at 12:23 pm
If everyone would moderate their comments the old fashioned way, one at a time and check the landing pages, this would not be a problem.
Vicemice on May 1, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Only now I have come to fully understand what no-follow attribute really means.Until now I never paid attention to this is now I now I was wrong.
I now use seo source for firefox to highlight nofollow links.
Oh, and thanks alot!!!
Aman (Software News) on May 25, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Nice Post! I was looking for this information all over the internet.
Compatibility Horoscope on Jun 3, 2008 at 6:35 am
Fantastic article, this is exactly the black and white answer we need.
Stomata on Jun 5, 2008 at 11:08 am
I want to congratulate you on your work to explaining this follow - nofollow issue. I’ve searched literally hundreds of site only to find little information.Thanks man.
Tom Sharper on Jun 10, 2008 at 3:24 am
Thanks for the info. Very informative.
Jose on Jun 22, 2008 at 3:55 pm
I have noticed tht G does index links fron no-follow sites. Now I understand.
www.websiteplex.com
jbr on Jun 28, 2008 at 3:36 pm
thank you
leif white on Jun 30, 2008 at 9:45 pm
HOW DO I GET SEARCH ENGINES TO NOT DISPLAY PREVIOUS SEARCHES. FOR INSTANCE IF I SEARCH FOR “AIR LINES” THE NEXT TIME I HIT “A” , THE WORD “AIR LINES” AUTOMATICLLY COMES UP. HOW DO I GET RID OF THAT?
Dudewtf? on Jul 4, 2008 at 3:33 am
no kidding? the no follow link is just plain evil.
y4yy on Jul 4, 2008 at 6:55 am
thank you man
Internet Marketing on Jul 17, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Do not worry too much about having your links in nofollow attribute. If you are writing good content, webmasters are more than happy to provide a link back. Focus should be placed on building great content.
Abs Tone on Jul 25, 2008 at 1:48 am
I find this very interesting but how can you really tell if a website has a no follow attribute?
sesli sohbet on Jul 26, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I have noticed tht G does index links fron no-follow sites. Now I understand.
sesli chat on Jul 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm
thanks
sesli sohbet on Jul 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm
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sesli sohbet on Jul 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm
thanks you.
يوتيوب on Aug 4, 2008 at 5:35 am
thanks alot
shawn on Aug 23, 2008 at 1:53 am
Strange google still shows up as links on my external links page in webmasters
shawn on Aug 23, 2008 at 1:53 am
Is there any info about live.com and no follow?
Sesli Chat on Aug 31, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Thx bro
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يوتيوب on Sep 5, 2008 at 9:22 am
Is there any info about live.com and no follow?
sesli sohbet on Sep 6, 2008 at 7:36 pm
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Kameralı Sesli Chat on Sep 11, 2008 at 1:43 pm
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Register a company on Sep 15, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Great information and certainly changes the ball park.
Rich
افلام on Oct 22, 2008 at 9:14 pm
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Monkey on Nov 10, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I am in the process of learning SEO techniques and just recently found out about “nofollow”. Glad to know that the comments I made on sites utilizing “nofollow” links would still have a benefit. I just wish more people used ASK.
Akvaryum on Nov 13, 2008 at 11:34 am
I have noticed this too with some Yahoo Answers I posted - which are nofollow links but seem to get some recognition in Yahoo. Whether this is because it is their own site, or whether it is because they still rate nofollow links to some degree, I’m not certain.
大妗姐 on Nov 13, 2008 at 10:16 pm
thankss.
新娘化妝 on Nov 13, 2008 at 11:09 pm
so so so nice
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