Hello I don't know if someone was aware of this, but im 100% sure that Google is counting as backlinks to my sites, some links with rel="nofollow". How i know that? Because in my webmaster tools account, seeing the "Pages with external links" i found MANY links to one of my sites that has rel="nofollow". Is this new? Somebody already knew this? This is HOT for me. Could change many things.
I've been curious about this for a while too. Just been looking at a competitors site with site explorer and hes been building links on high PR blogs like crazy but loads of them are no follow. This guy still managed to get on page one for his chosen keyword though and it is a competitive one. Still no way to be 100% sure though, just because Google identifies it as an incoming link to your site doesn't mean they pay any attention to it, anyone else confirm this?
from my experience, it seems so, I found domains with wikipedia backlink (no-follow) have higher PR and SERP compared with those don't...just a guess, no rigorous proof.
Yes, there is a way to be 100% secure. Go to your Google Webmaster Tools, check the external links pointing to your site, follow each one an look at the link and booom, you will find rel="nofollow". Yes, NOFOLLOW. What shocked me, is that i found nofollow links to my site from a BIG internet site. Im not going to tell which one, because i want to build some links from that site to mine before everybody knows and do the same. But believe me, links from BIG sites, with nofollow are showed in Webmaster Tools as backlinks to your site. If Google is showing this, its the most reliable proof we can get. So, lets make a party!!
Google never said that they won't recognize the link, they just state that they would not allow the PR to leak. It won't count in their PR calculation.
It effect, my friend, but a bit slower and taking an indirect route: Since the other search engines and Google all spider each other but the rest does not follow the Google nofollow game. Let's take as an example ask.com spidering your link from a blog and indexes you, - now Google spiders ask.com and finds your link, be sure it will count something. I never have been a pure fighter for the dofollow links and always placed my links where I could; the results show, it's worth the time spent.
Hello... Yes they count... but since no juice is forwarded its the lowest level of acceptance laterz malcolm
I believe the no follow tag is counted as backlinks, it's showing up in my results from my own twitter account.
Mmmmm... They said they will not COUNT (and will not FOLLOW IT) to get the iead of the importance of your site, etc. So, explain me, why is Google showing me that NOFOLLOW link in my webmaster tool account in the same block of the other links? If we are talking about SEO, and if Google is really ignoring nofollow, then they have no importance at all...
We can discuss all night about nofollow and the theory each one has about it. The point is that now we have some proof (with 1005 of authority) that Google, IN SOME WAY at least, count the nofollow. They consider it important in some way and show it to you, as any other incoming link (nofollow are in the same group as dofollow). That a VERY BIG point, in my opinion. I will comeback later with a small tool (im a developer) to share here with people interested on this stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google did count nofollow links. They might have decided that the nofollow experiment was rather unsuccessful as it did very little to stop buying & selling PR links.
Give me one hour and i will share with all of you this tiny but usefull tool (freeware) to analyze this backlinks. This will help us to take out the mistery of all this nofollow google LIE!!
I have seen this for a while. All my links from Yahoo answers now show as nofollow. but as monfis mentioned above, no PR would be gained by them.
Okay, App is ready for download. What does this gizmo does? It helps you to analize the incoming links that the Google's Webmaster Tools shows. http://yenerich.com/webmaster-stuff/google-incoming-links-analyzer/nofollow-analizer/ Any comment please in this thread, don't send email to the blog please.