Haven't they always? I am not sure but I think that WMT's has always shown links from one site to yours, regardless of weather they are nofollow, dofollow, from authority sites or not. I don't think Google ever intended to just show dofollow links in webmaster tools, After all it says in webmaster tools << Pages with external links "This table provides a list of pages on http://www.example.com/ that have links pointing to them from other sites." It also mentions that "While the External links page provides a larger sampling of links to your site, not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal." As many have said, nofollow links do not pass PR. But as we all know, PR is not the only thing that determines SERP's. Cheers James
I've known for a while that Google has a spot in their algorithm for no-follow backlinks. But I always assumed it was to prevent fake rankings in Google search because of all the SEO people who work for nothing but do-follow links.
If those links don't counts, why Google show them in the webmaster tools? We can use arguments in both ways, but at least for me, the doubt is growing (and with this info its bigger than ever).
They don't count towards PR, other than that, they are normal links. This has always been the case. You can also verify this under webmaster tools > "what google sees" (i think that is the tab, but i may be wrong) In this tab, you can view the text of the external links that you have to your site, you will notice that some of the nofollows will be listed here as well as "external links" Any time that google uses the term "vote" they are referring to their PR algorithm.
Speaking about nofollow,i also noticed trade links gives credit too-those are links which looks like this: tradescript.php?u=http://domain.com Many people will say how this cannot be credit as backlink but more trades i add better serps i have.
Most people has make a picture of the nofollow stuff (and Google has pushed us to have that picture). In that picture nofollow has cero value and that does not seams to be correct. At least not now. Maybe some time before, but not now. In believe that Google was changing the direction, in silence. The fact that they collect even my nofollow links, make stronger the idea that nofollow has more value today, that the one Google tried to make us believe. i don't think is just a "casual" info that Google is showing, with no purpouse.
Today we can't speak saying that a link is "normal". Google has modified that in such a big way. (The correct word could be "pervert", in the original usage). The site are hidding the "real" original links, behind javascript or behind nofollow. Because they don't want to loose PR. If you saw a dofollow links in a site, usually its because the webmaster is a newbie or because he is doing some SEO practice. The links has not really being counting as normal votes much time ago. In fact, if Google want to really know the importance of a site, they can follow and count the nofollow links and there they will find the real world. Not the artifficial and strange stuff they had build. Let me give you an example: download.com (cnet). People goes there looking for software. BUT all the links to the software and the developers are nofollow or behind javascript. Remember that people visits those sites because they are interested on the links to the software or developers. If you find a dofollow link i those big portals, its a SEO practice. There can be exceptions, but usually, sites use nofollow for the "real" links and use dofollow for their SEO practices (Artificial links that nobody cares, except the webmaster doing the SEO).
This is how Google handle nofollowed links : We don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
No name Maybe Google CSV Links Analizer. Its not a complete software, just a tool i code in a couple of hours.
I had an interesting experience a week ago that proved to me positively that Google counts "nofollow" links towards SERPs. One of our sites (cutebabyfix.com) has a large number of backlinks (all "nofollow" from a PR6 site (cuteoverload.com). On Friday the 3rd, they switched from Typepad to WordPress and all of my links from them dropped out of view as far as Google was concerned. When this happened, our ranking for "cute baby" went from #1 in Google to #87! Once all of CuteOverload.com's links were re-indexed, we slowly crawled back up to the top 5. This cemented my belief that "nofollow" links still count for SERPs.
Yeah...It's 100% true. Google also count NOFOLLOW links. It doesn't matter to Google weather it's DOFOLLOW or NOFOLLOW. So, try your best to increase backlinks.
NOFOLLOW tag is for Search Engines.... NOFOLLOW tells robots not to follow them... its included in the in links as those are real links which links to anotehr site....
In general i agree,but have anyone thought that google will show you only the first layer of their operation and they try to keep secret the depest procession? What about that?It is the simplest thing allmost a must at that kind of companies.