SEO & Yahoo : Indexing of No Follow Links
One priceless aspect of the V7ndotcom elursrebmem SEO contest is that it will be unveiling the workings of the Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Teoma search engines as indexing, ranking, and backlinks will be closely monitored by all sites entering the contest, whether those entrants be SEO oriented or not.
Alek at Watching Paint Dry has noticed that the Yahoo Search Engine is picking up “no follow” links in his entry page‘s backlinks. Goes to show that being covered by, participating in the comments of or obtaining a link from a blog or site using “no follow” link condoms are still of some search engine value (not to mention the real value – traffic and reputation).
On Google Blogoscoped Philipp posts Alek’s observation :
Alek points out another noteworthy (some may say weird) behavior, this one with Yahoo. A Yahoo search for backlinks to Alek’s page shows Google Blogoscoped in the list. However, so far I only linked to Alek’s contest page using the “nofollow” attribute value to not skew the competition results. Now it’s not wrong per se for Yahoo to show this backlink – after all, Yahoo may index and show the backlink, and still not attach any linkjuice to it – but this is an interesting find nonetheless.
So, even links from no follow coded pages can appear in Yahoo’s backlink index, as those links are actually being followed by search engines. I’ll also go out on a limb to say that the aspect of the no follow link is a bit outdated when it comes to search indexing & ranking, as even if those links don’t pack “ranking juice”, they will help to define you and your site’s:
* online reputation
* profiles of users who visit your site and sites they have visited in the past
* clustering of similar pages and content
* and identifying links to pages which may have not had SEO in mind when obtaining those links or contributing to such discussions.
Such variables, included in a new age algo (and some in published Google & Yahoo patent apps), sound quite revelant to me, even if those links have no “PageRank” or “SiteRank” juice.
