Sorry if this has been brought up before. I did a search but couldn't find the answers I was looking for. Thanks in advance!
Just check for yourself: open the HTML page source find the link and see if it contains rel="nofollow" or rel="external, nofollow."
I can't find nofollow or external nofollow tag in the signature of forum.deviastart.com It is dofollow
I could'nt find your answer. But I think that a NOFOLLOW link is better then NO LINK. Even a nofollow link is clickable and you'll get traffic to your site, so keep it and do not avoid it. Tks, QUIM Alcantara Visual Artist & Designer http://quim.com.br
I wouldn't worry about the DF or NF. This issue has been put to rest and G was pretty much telling a little "fib". There are studies out there that shows the google bot still following a link even when there is a nofollow attribute. They also show up on backlink lists as well.
HERES YOUR ANSWER I pulled a random signature off the following page: http://news.deviantart.com/article/111394/?offset=10#comments Here's the HTML code: <div class="text text-ii">Thank you for including my piece. :heart"<br /><br />--<br /> Carbonmade<br />Portraits - <a class="external" href="http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://roxnebres.carbonmade.com">[link]</a><br />Concert - <a class="external" href="http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://allaccess.carbonmade.com">[link]</a><br />Flickr<br /><a class="external" href="http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.flickr.com/photos/roxannenebres">[link]</a></div> HTML: The links ARE do follow, however if you link to anything offsite it changes the hyperlink to a warning page, i.e.: http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://allaccess.carbonmade.com If you click that, you get this big assed 'WARNING YOU ARE LEAVING DEVIANTART!' page. That page gives a small hyperlink to your target page, example: <a href="http://allaccess.carbonmade.com" title="http://allaccess.carbonmade.com" class="gmbutton2 gmbutton2c">Continue to <span style="text-decoration:underline">http://allaccess.carbonmade.com</span><b></b></a> HTML: You can see the link is DOFOLLOW. Nor is there a robots meta tag to block the search engines from following it, and robots.txt says it's fine to follow the /users/outgoing section on the site. So the short answer: The links ARE DOFOLLOW, however a landing page is put between deviantart and your target page which makes it not as valuable. But it will count for something.
Thanks a lot for that people, especially Christian! Sometimes there are links on a single page which are dofollow and others which are not, hence the question. Like I sometimes get dofollow links from digg but other times nofollow. I got a few more questions here: 1) Regarding what you said Christian, I wonder if big G will see it as a 'bad' link and penalize you for it since it's misleading whoever's clicking it to a page which is not the link you're showing. Sort of like a popup before you get to the actual page. 2) bigcat1967, the point you brought up regarding how G still counts it as a backlink, I've been wondering for a long time if that's the case. I know yahoo siteexplorer picks up every single link that you're ever associated with, be in missing or nofollow. The question is have any of those nofollow links show up in your webmastertool or even link:url.com before? Regards gasura
What determines if a link is good or bad is determined by the context of the site in relation to the site it's linking to. So if you linked from deviantart to your blog on art supplies or whatever, it would be fine. But if you linked from deviantart to your weight loss site, there would be a drop in the value of the link as it's not contextually relevant. It won't completely devalue a link, but it's not worth anywhere near as much as it would be if you linked to something relevant to art/creative expressionism type stuff. I find that Google will very rarely penalize you for getting a link. It's usually only when you bowl links and get like 500+ links from an unrelated site that they blow a fit. You have to think about the logic involved - if G penalized you for any unrelated link, then there is not way Adobe would have PR10. 90% of their links are from unrelated websites.
It seems to be logic. You need to find some sites related to yours to link and get link backs. By the way... what's the most important art related websites?
Thanks for the reply, good insights there, but I think you misunderstood me. What I meant was the 'warning you're about to leave deviantart!' page, does it appear to G as the destination of the link OR does the robot passes through that link and reach my website.