I have read a number of threads recently in this forum that suggest that a nofollow link still provides SEO value, just not Pagerank. Is there any evidence for this? Has Google, Matt Cutts, or anybody of authority explained this? If so, I would appreciate the link. Otherwise, it just seems like it could lead to a lot of people wasting a lot of time building nofollow links, thinking they are getting SEO benefit...
Wikipedia says: "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow#Interpretation_by_the_individual_search_engines
Official Google position has nothing to do with the reality. I believe, that link from Wikipedia still adds some value to linked site. It's maybe not juice, but some kind of "trust". But it seems not to be passing any juice to the recipient, including an anchor text.
Despite the fact that you think their position doesn't hold any value, Google's official position is: How does 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. I disagree that it passes any sort of 'trust'. Why? Because Google specifically says to use the nofollow attribute on links that are NOT trustworthy. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
Care to explain why you think this? I've got my own thoughts on this as well, but would be nice to hear your point of view as to why this is the case.
Honestly, I'm surprised there aren't more comments on this thread. It seems like there are many other threads with the posters saying that no-follow links still provide value for SEO. Is it because I asked for back-up for that position?
You are exactly right. If anyone is building NoFollow links in hopes of improving their ranking they are in for a big disappointment. Here's Google's opinion about NoFollow links: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
i'm sure google dont count no follow i'm not sure if yahoo does or not. no follow is only good for traffic but make sure its related to your sight Do follow counts as pr and gets you higher in serps but do it manually.
absolutly correct. excellent link you have posted. i had a major doubt about no follow and dofollow, now iam very cleal. thanx for the post.
I've performed few tests and I can say nofollow doesn't provide anything (no PR, no anchor text) to pointed website.
Plus, the end aim of SEO is to increases traffic, and Wikipedia links [in my experience] can pass a ton of traffic at times.