Does Google acknowledge the nofollow tag? Does a link lose its link credit if it has the nofollow tag? Thanks
Try it... get link with nofollow tag from strong & relevant site. It'll help your Google ranking for that phrase. Needless to say you should test is on an uncompetitive phrase.
No, I wanted to know where you saw some sort of conclusive or authoritative info on the subject. Just because you a) got a nofollowed link once, and sometime later that year b) your rankings might have rose, does not mean that a caused b. Have any other sources? -Michael
No, that's wrong, you need to read the comments. It turns out he used the phrase in his internal navigation... since fixing that, he no longer ranks for it. This is more proof against them being counted (since he disappeared after fixing it) than for it. Sorry. -Michael
I've tried it on page that doesn't contain the phrase which I used as anchor text. Because the phrase had only 9 results it was easy to see that my page was the 10th result 3 weeks after I got that link (I got no other link with keyword that even in the same theme).
Your example is exactly the one exception known: on phrases that are very uncommon the linktekst on a no-follow-link still counts. For business reasons though that's hardly any use at all. Who wants to rank for a phrase with just 9 results? Even if you do, you could easily do it without getting that no-follow link.
I would think that Google does not just ignore nofollows, I'd say they put a wait and see on nofollows. As an example, Wikipedia is nofollow but if a link exists there and survives (anyone can edit out a spammy link), it says a lot about the quality of the link.
I only said it still counts, the fact that it count much less then normal link isn't arguable. My example was only to show it does give some juice.
i'm not sure about this, even if all seo books are saying that. Seo books are also saying that you will not get any advantage for words in the url if the words are not separed by a " - ". I don't think this is true, i have seen some websites ranking well for non-optimised keywords just because that words are in the url, not separated by " - ". I can't tell you why i'm not sure that google ignore nofollow tag because it is relative, but you can't convince me that this is happening. I've seen websites with backlinks coming mainly from websites with nofollow, wordpress blogs, etc, ranking very well.
Google doesn't ignore anything. They collect data. All data. You think they throw some of it away? Is you crazy?
Sure, but the weight is very little. Many links are valuable even if they do have rel-no-follow on them. That value is based on visitor numbers mostly though, and on people seeing the links. This is true for delicio, wikipedia and stumbleupon for instance. But for any reasonably competitive field rel-no-follow links are not going to get your sit up in the serps enough.
I have actually also seen a few reports that although Google is supposed to discard nofollow links but they still seem to count some of them. http://seoblackhat.com/2007/05/08/nofollow-and-how-google-really-verifys-links/
I don't think google can ignore nofollow completely. social bookmarking sites such as delicious have implemented the nofollow tag...that's a large and active market that they can't just ignore
I am sure Google ignores no data. Some data they would weight heavier than others, other data may have negative weighting or may be a flag to ban. I am sure they are sorting out the "I'll digg you if you digg me" social bookmarks from some organic wave of interest.