Some links are marked as nofollow links eg. blog comments, etc. Google will not pass PR to such links. And it will not consider the anchor text for that link. But will the link be counted as a backlink to the page. Will that link come up in link:domain.com ? What about yahoo and MSN? Do they count such links as backlinks? Thanks in advance.
That is the current situation and maybe Yahoo and MSN will change it so they do not count backlinks with the nofollow attribute in future algorithm changes.
That's one of the consequences of using nofollow, but it's not the purpose. The purpose is to indicate that you are linking to a site whose 'trust' you haven't established. It's useful for blog commentors' links.
Yes, maybe not to leak PR away from a site, but mainly was a vote by the webmaster saying the site was: 1. Not relevant 2. Not trustworthy In this instance, scraper sites readily applying the nofollow attribute are able to scrape content that isn't theirs, claim the site they scraped it from isn't a trustworthy site and attempt to outperform the sites they scraped content from by ranking above them in serps. Google never made it clear whether the nofollow attribute would pass any negative affects to the site that was being referenced.
Consequence or purpose You can safely link to a site with nofollow attribute in the link, so you will not be penalised if that site is doing some un ethical things / it is banned.
Can we summarise -> Nofollow means - the site is saying that it is neutral about the linked site. May or may not be trustworthy. For Google --> No PR leak and no counting b-links. (Is this 2nd point 100% confirmed) For msn - yahoo --> Nothing such as PR. And they are still counting them as b-links. What remains to be answered, is that what value do msn and yahoo give to these links? Are they same as any other backlinks? If yes, then they might change that in their next upgrade. Else, if they view these links as less important than normal backlinks, then we should not expect any changes. These are my thoughts.
I see the mods have shifted the thread. Sorry for posting in the wrong place. I thought that the earlier category was appropriate.
Just one point related to nofollow, Google can find way to target page from nofollow link. Maybe this seems to be silly point to many.
MSN and Yahoo ignore the nofollow tag, so it has no impact - the link is seen just like any other link.
Here's your Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/ Once you install it, simply right-click on the little status bar icon and enable "Highlight Nofollow links". Firefox will then automatically highlight rel="nofollow" links with a nice dotted box by default. This extension is just really nice, I use it on a regular basis. You can test how the extension works with "Previous Thread" and "Next Thread" links, right below this thread. Hope this helps, Warkot
Once again, this myth needs to be dispelled. Sites don't "leak" PR. This is completely false and uninformed. Reference 1180 Reference 28434 Reference 38575
That is a great tool, thanks for telling us! For anyone who uses FireFox, know that this took less than 5 seconds literally, all you do is hit install, a pop-up box and hit install one more time, it's downloaded and that's it. Continue browsing and the next time you open up FireFox it'll be there! There is no such thing as PR Leaking for sure, but when you do put up links (or even sell links) you should link to sites in the same category as yours. If it was an SEO Blog, link to sites related to SEO or Web Development! Don't link to bad neighborhoods or gambling sites or anything! I don't remember if this affects your SEO, can someone verify this?