Yahoo Slurp following rel="nofollow" links

[jbladeus]

I just checked backlinks of one of my sites on yahoo site explorer and noted that the first site being shown in the results is a site which has my link with a "nofollow" attribute. :D

Does this mean that yahoo doesnt care about rel="nofollow"? Can anybody else check and confirm this from their own sites? And what about MSN?

[Avishai]

I noticed that too with Yahoo.

[trichnosis]

i have it too. people says "all major search engines doeas not follow nofollow" but yahoo follows "nofollow" so yahoo is not a major search engine:D

[Cryogenius]

Technically, rel="nofollow" does not mean the search engines won't spider the page. They will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel="nofollow" means is "don't trust the link", i.e. don't pass PageRank/TrustRank, etc.

The robots meta tag "nofollow" is different, and really does mean "don't follow links from this page", and has nothing to do with backlinks or PageRank.

Cryo.

[mad4]

Yeah, what cryo said. :)

[BrianR2]

I've noticed that Yahoo lists nofollow links in their backlinks as well but I'm not sure if they actually "follow" the link or pass on credit. Has anyone found Slurp coming to their site through a nofollow link?
I don't think MSN lists nofollow links as backlinks.

[Michael]

Google, Yahoo, MSN and rel=”nofollow” (http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php).

- Michael

[Nida G]

Technically, rel="nofollow" does not mean the search engines won't spider the page. They will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel="nofollow" means is "don't trust the link", i.e. don't pass PageRank/TrustRank, etc.

The robots meta tag "nofollow" is different, and really does mean "don't follow links from this page", and has nothing to do with backlinks or PageRank.

Cryo.


Yup...Accepted..i also think so...

[jbladeus]

Thanks for the clarification guys. This clears up quite a few things.

[Diddy1]

Yeah it's been that way since forever. Even though it doesn't count for you it still shows up in explorer.

Thank You

[BrianR2]

Google, Yahoo, MSN and rel=”nofollow” (http://www.seo-blog.com/rel-nofollow.php).
- Michael


That's a very interesting article/experiment. I didn't realize Google treats nofollow in those ways you described.

[vic_msn]

yahoo follows the "nofollow" tag for proof in Yahoo answers any URL you type is automatically tagged nofollow

[BrianR2]

yahoo follows the "nofollow" tag for proof in Yahoo answers any URL you type is automatically tagged nofollow

Whether they tag a link as nofollow in Yahoo Answers doesn't really have to do with whether their bot follows nofollow links or not.

[winterset]

there are plenty of examples of yahoo isting backlinks that have nofollow tags

[oseymour]

The follow the link and it even shows in a backlink check. they do not use the nofollow links when calculating rankings.

[smartgirl]

How about when 100% of a site links have "nofollow" and the kw for what the site ranks for is pretty competitive so just on-site seo isn't enought ? I recently analysed competition for terms pretty competitive and i discovered several sites having 100 % links from blogs with "nofollow" tag.

[BrianR2]

How about when 100% of a site links have "nofollow" and the kw for what the site ranks for is pretty competitive so just on-site seo isn't enought ? I recently analysed competition for terms pretty competitive and i discovered several sites having 100 % links from blogs with "nofollow" tag.

If it's in Yahoo and there really aren't any links without nofollow then Yahoo must be counting them. My guess is that they must have some links that aren't nofollowed. You can't do it with on-site seo alone; you need backlinks.

[Franck S]

I just started to use the nofollow attribute on my sites for PR distribution, and I am wondering if it will not hurt my sites?