nofollow question ?

Bots will not follow a link with 'nofollow' attribute but that link will still be counted as a backlink.
Is that right ?

 

ya it is true,it will be counted in backlinks but it won't help you to improve your PR.

 

No, you've got that backwards: Bots will follow a link with 'nofollow' attribute but that link will not be counted as a backlink.

Only setting the robots meta tag to "nofollow" will stop bots from following links.

Cryo.

 

Hi Cryo,

I think you've got the first part right, but not the second !

- bots will follow a link with 'nofollow' attribute : TRUE
- that link will not be counted as a backlink : TRUE
- setting the robots meta tag to "nofollow" will stop bots from following links : FALSE

"nofollow" in the robots meta tag will act exactly as the "nofollow" attribute, but on all links in the page.

Jean-Luc

 

No, not according to Wikipedia Spam in blogs:

and not according to The Robots Exclusion Protocol:

 

Bingo Google has a page on this somewhere as well..

They will still follow the link, for the purpose of indexing all pages online, but they look at the nofollow tag as your site saying.. uhh here be the link, feel free to check it out, but if it sux, don't come crying to us.. we don't recomend it

 

You quoted first class sources, but to "follow a link" does not mean a lot to me. Three things are important :
- transfer of link popularity
- permission or not to fetch a URL
- permission or not to index a page

What I mean is that <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> does not stop bots from crawling and indexing the URL's in the links.

How could it ? Would it be the case, it would be easy to remove a competitor site from Google index.

Jean-Luc

 

Here's what Google says on the subject:

This means that any links from your site will not be crawled or added to the Google index. If a link on your site is already known about by Google, then it will stay in the index. Google will not remove competitors from the index just because you added the nofollow meta tag.

Let me explain with an example: if I have a web page with the nofollow meta tag, and it contains the a link to another page which has no other links to it anywhere on the web, it will not be crawled. If another website links to that same page, and has no meta nofollow tag, then Google will crawl it after all.

Cryo.