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.
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very informative posting.
Thanks a lot …. this will really be very helpful and the matter of the fact is the whole content fall so smoothly at place …. make it very readable …. appreciate the effort.
Very informative one on no follow links treated by major search engines.The beauty is the interview with top officials of search engines.
very useful info, thanks for taking the time to check with the head honchos and sharing the skinny, which I assume is still true ( though I have read elsewhere that google does follow the no follow but doesn’t pass any page rank)
Thank you wery mach.. :)
thank you very mach
Thank you for the clarification on no-follow links. Personally, i think a site with only follow-links are unnatural.
So getting some no-follow links are good in some extent.
Cheow
thank you veri mach. Çok Teşekkürler Yani ;)
This article is really informative, i suppose clears all doubts on “no follow” links.
çok teşekkür ederim
thank you very mach okey!
:) Thank you veri mach.
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Dude, would it kill you to delete the spam comments?
So why are the links in blog comments (like this one) no-follow by default? What is the reason behind it?
Don’t worry, found your opinion on another blog article of yours: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/13-reasons-why-nofollow-tags-suck/4410/
DO you think its relevant to have no-follows on your own blog on the topic?
Thank you for clarifying the finer points of “no follow” attributes and search engines.
very nice chart :)
good o know for at least ask.com my comment is worth sth :)
funny thing with what google says – I’ve read many time that they DO follow (meaning robot goes to the site) and index it, but doeas not give any PR..
why with so simple one bit problem we have so much – they do? they dont? :)
Can,t believe this is a no follow through page
About as clear as mud I’d say. As usual you have to read between the lines when digesting exactly what Google says. The only thing we can rely on is that nofollow links block the flow of PageRank. But nothing else can be deduced from that.
Need to make a little correction there, as Google indexes the site whether it has no follow or do follow :)
The only tag that prevents an url to get indexed is the no index tag.
Anyway, great article.
Very interesting! I always suspected that the link was actually followed by engines other than Google.
I thought I was up on SEO of a website page, This brings new light to tags & no follow tags in particular.
I always thought that google follows the no-follow links but does not give pagerank. Thanks for clearing this up.
Hmm I just saw that google has listed a inbound link in my webmaster tools that is a nofollow. They should not do this or have I analyzed your article wrong
This is now outdated, or Google were being liberal with the truth to begin with. I did a test fairly recently on a new blog. Before I even added an entry or pinged it in anyway, I dropped a link to one of its inner pages on a very popular social site which is quite definitely ‘nofollow’ – I even triple checked the source code. By the time it took me to get the browser with my stats up, Googlebot had already visited my site, literally, within seconds. So, they do follow it. My site hasn’t been indexed (yet), but they do ‘follow’ ‘nofollow’.
To be honest, if they were true to the ‘nofollow’ they invented, they wouldn’t even follow it.
I know there are some diehard IM’ers out there who want to believe there is some worth to ‘nofollow’ links. The only worth they have is direct traffic, and whether we like it or not, they have no influence on Googles SERPS.