Comments on: How Does Google Really Treat Nofollow Links?

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:34:13 +0000

I think Google will continue to claim that it doesn’t count to try and curb comment spam. But I also have my second thoughts about it.

As a webmaster, I think even nofollow links have value as long as they bring traffic (regardless of Pagerank impact). And I think they will continue to bring traffic if the comments are relevant and aligned with the site’s theme.

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:05:00 +0000

Google definitely follows the link in the sense of indexing the page on the other side. The question of how nofollow links influence ranking is probably still up for debate. According to Google the links shouldn’t have any effect, but it seems to me that they do have some value.

By: Alfred

Alfred — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:13:27 +0000

I think nofollow links from some sites do help as googlebot passes through the site more often and therefore gets you faster indexing. They may count somewhat if the topic of both pages are the same.

By: Spa wherever you are

Spa wherever you are — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:44:17 +0000

From my experience google treats no follow links as really no follow. Although they might sometimes show up on web master tools after a month or two it’s gone, but I think no follow or not just link ahead. Even if google doesn’t find it probably someone who needs it might stumble upon and read it.

By: carl

carl — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:57:05 +0000

Listen up everybody – dont be so naive in thinking Google does not pay any attention to the nofollow, of course it does. It may no show the majority of them up like say Yahoo but when it downloads your webpages to its computers it reads the whole page and every link on them regardless if its got a nofollow. It just doesnt stop and disregard it because there’s this word infront of the hyperlink, or if there is a follow it then doesnt just shoot of the page and goto the other site. These massive computers read the page in its entirety and every other page flying around out there. It then proceeds to calculate all this data and every single in and out link from the WWW and mathematically produces results starting with the highest scoring sites and works is way down to the lowest. This would be totally silly and disastrous in terms of the efficiency of its power house search results if it did not gather all links. Getting information out of Google is like getting blood from a stone probably harder infact, and why? Simply because every webmaster would know how to manipulate there PR and serps. You would end up with crappy sites topping page 1 of the results. Google lets the odd flimsy comment out to guide you all in the correct way that they see in managing and operating sites better for the end user. Blogging and article sites play an enormous role for webmasters in there advertising strategies and over half of these sites have the nofollow. Believe me when i say, Google may not publicly acknowledge them in showing you and me but thats just a peice of programming in the computers but they are there and have been taken into account. Do they hold the weight of a follow link? No they dont!

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:37:52 +0000

Thanks. I think for the most part rel=”nofollow” works the same way it always has. It’s meant to tell a search engine not to count the link as a vote for the page being linked to.

For a time PageRank sculpting using nofollow was the tactic du jour for many SEOs. Then Google came out saying it no longer worked and hadn’t for awhile.

Yesterday SEOmoz posted that PR sculpting with nofollow still works.

I didn’t have any plans to write another post on the subject, but perhaps I’ll do a little research and see what I find.

Thanks for the suggestion.

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:17:02 +0000

Glad you liked the post. I guess I’ve done something right for it to still be showing up in Google too.

By: slsteve

slsteve — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:21:42 +0000

Well this post is from 2007 and still its showing up in top place in google. But I want to know how google treats rel nofollow links now (in 2009). Could you do some research on that and let your blog readers like me know? I will come back to this post again to read your comments. Hope to find some update in about a months time. GREAT POST!

By: John Hannula

John Hannula — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:19:58 +0000

The fact that your blog post is still being read a few years later is a solid accomplishment. I stumbled upon it through a google search and the information has been helpful. Thank you

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:37:05 +0000

True, but originally that’s not what they said they did. (at least I don’t think they did? It has been a couple of years since I wrote this post )

I believe they originally claimed to ignore the link completely. My point was they obviously were keeping track of the link regardless of what value they gave to the link.

Of course Google has changed what they say and do with nofollow quite a few times since it’s inception.