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.
Of course, this Selsi person who is spamming this website understands that this site itself implements a no-follow rule?
Thank you for this article, it makes my job a little harder though.
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Wow, Great Article.
I thought all SE’s treated nofollow the same. The thought didn’t even cross my mind that they didn’t.
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Fine discuss on no-follow, bookmark it and I’ll read it tomorrow because it’s too late. Wikis dose a bad work. Why close itself within walls.
Well thanks for bringing this up i think google needs to go this way as well and be more open.
great summary of nofollow links, very useful
I don’t think google underestimates nofollow links, I have seen many guys ranking high with no-follow comments.
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I think Google allows more for no follow than they let on. They don’t tell everything.
I wonder, does Google follow their own “FOLLOW” links on their blogs? In other words if I visit a blogspot.com blog and like it and then click their follow me link and add myself will Google find me?
Really good information. I just watched an online seminar that said differently, but I figured the nofollow links had to have some value. I mean comments from people are important.
think Google allows more for no follow than they let on. They don’t tell everything.
As long as one major search engine ignores No Follow tags, they are technically not working.
thank you this is very important article
Really good information. I just watched an online seminar that said differently, but I figured the nofollow links had to have some value. I mean comments from people are important
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Fine discuss on no-follow, bookmark it and I’ll read it tomorrow because it’s too late. Wikis dose a bad work. Why close itself within walls.
thank you this is very important article
As long as one major search engine ignores No Follow tags, they are technically not working.
think Google allows more for no follow than they let on. They don’t tell everything.
I don’t think google underestimates nofollow links, I have seen many guys ranking high with no-follow comments.
Fine discuss on no-follow, bookmark it and I’ll read it tomorrow
Fine discuss on no-follow
Very nice and very informative
Thanks for the article Loren.
very interesting, thanks for your article
I really don’t care if a site uses no-follow or do-follow atribute…every link I get do matter…
I really love this info that you have here on nofollow.
So at the end of the day after I post this Yahoo will see it as a backlink.
I had a website that we were excluding from the robots and yet Yahoo found a post of mine here, counted as a link and actually called the website my user name for about a week until slurp came around to the site. So I would say they might not be tell people the truth.
thanks admin.
thanks for sharing. Been wondering about that
Thanks mate this has cleared up a few niggling little bits of info I was after.
Thank you very much for clearing the concept about no follow links.
If a site is a quality one such as wikipedia and giving you link, it doesn’t matter whether the link is follow or no follow.
Official clarification on exactly how each search engine treats nofollow. Thanks for the great information.
Thank you for sharing this informative post and clearing the No-follow links. Some web directories offer free links placement services but put the link with this attribute.
Thanks again and best regards,
Alex
Even though this post is two years old, it still holds water. Since the Big G is where you want to be ranked, it is obviously important to follow what they say – if you have backlinks from do-follow sites with high PR and authority, then you will do well in the search engines.
I believe Google is now working on relevance and local search results.
This article is a good place to start, though, for the no-follow mystery.
Nice Post! Thanx
Even though this post is two years old
This article is really interesting. I didn’t realise that search engines treat no follow tags differently. The thing to remember is that Google has somewhere between 78% and 88% or the entire search engine market share (in the UK anyway) and because links with the “no follow” attribute aren’t followed by Googlebot they are of no use in an SEO campaign.
In the past I have spent lots of time submitting my websites to various web directories only to find out afterwards that the links are no follow – hence of no use to me when trying to build my inbound links for SEO as nearly all of my traffic comes through Google.
Nice Post! Thanx
n the past I have spent lots of time submitting my websites to various web directories only to find out afterwards that the links are no follow
Cool Post there :D
hey its graetes post ever seen
don’t think google underestimates nofollow links, I have seen many guys ranking high with no-follow comments.
good!thanks!
great posting, love u guys.
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