To Follow or notfollow

04.27.2007 // Insights, SEO // Kiven // No Comments

Here’s an interesting discussion regarding how search engines such as google and yahoo treat links with the “nofollow” attribute. For those of you thinking “follow-what?”, here’s a quick rundown:

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute[1] would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and MSN search engines also respect this tag. [wikipedia]

More about the discussion after the jump.

Loren Baker of the Search Engine Journal writes:

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……

……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.

Here is an excerpt from Loren’s article:

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.

So to sum it up, Google does treat links with nofollow as we’ve (bloggers and SEO individuals) always believed but Yahoo and Ask not only follows the link but also makes it available to its algorithm making nofollow links not that useless. It also doesn’t mean that if a link has a nofollow attribute it will not be seen by search engines but instead no link value nor referral attribution is given.