Matt Cutts and rel='external nofollow' on his blog

I was under the assumption that Google didn't follow links with rel='external nofollow', but it seems Matt Cutts Blog, even though the comments are set to rel='external nofollow', I'm still seeing my comments on his blog as backlinks in my Google Webmasters Tools?

What's the real deal with rel='external nofollow' ???

I mean, if Googlebot is going to follow the links, what's the point of "nofollow" ? I use "nofollow" on my forums and sites so that the crawler bot *doesn't* follow certain links I don't want it to. I can't use the robots.txt to exclude forum threads, so I hacked my SMF install to put nofollow on certain folders that contain stuff I don't want indexed???

 

Maybe the syntax of 'nofollow' is incorrect.

 

I blogged about this very subject a while back, and it seems that a lot of NOFOLLOW links are showing up in the webmaster tools. I have a bunch of PR9 and PR8 backlinks listed that weren't before.

 

it's my understanding that a no follow tag prevents any PR from being passed, but does not affect crawling and indexing.

 

Google says that it doesn't count the PR of a nofollow link, but I think it still uses the anchor text information from them, so they still may help improve your rankings indirectly.

 

i think both are same.

wordpress is using external nofollow by the default

 

Isn't it supposed to be rel="nofollow"? Where'd the "external nofollow" come from? Same function?

 

That's my understanding as well -- nofollow is just a PR thing

 

Both are the same nofollow and external nofollow

 

I believe those links are counted but do not influence site's rankings.

 

Is rel="nofollow" not rel='external nofollow'

 

nofollow sucks big time.

no honest webmaster is using this shit.

 

As you hit the nofollow 'Post Reply' button to say.

 

sorry, i only thought about blogs and comments.
of course "nofollow" can be useful for certain links like your example.

but "killing" links in blog comments is not fair when you don't spam.

 

The reason many forums and blogs started using the nofollow tag was because so many people were making frivolous posts just so they could get easy backlinks to their sites. It was getting so bad that many forums had almost nothing but spam in them.

 

Definitely, it prevent the juice to passed to other site.

 

Nofollow'd links are looked at as if the link doesn't exist, a nofollow link won't get a page crawled or indexed.

 

OMG I thought nofollow was to deal with spam so if nofollow means we follow a bit but wont follow too close then spamers can ignore nofollow knowing they wont be followed and anchor text is ok but just no pr given and they are not followed by the nofollow.

Call in Inspetor Sherlock Holmes he has a magnifying glass to follow all , oh and a dog with big flappy ears.

 

It's fair one way or the other. you should NEVER get juice to pr or serps because you put a link to your site in someone else's blog. That is not the intended function.

PR and SERPS are checking for websites that put links on them. not from some random schmuck that leaves a comment on a blog.

 

Why wouldn't it show up as a backlinks? It is a backlink no matter what instructions are given to bots. it doesn't mean it's passing "link juice" just because it shows up as a backlink.