What I mean is, say I post a link on a site like yahoo answers and it just comes out as a regular piece of text, will it count as a proper backlink? Thanks!
I've asked the same question myself. The OP is asking if dropping a non clickable link in Yahoo Answers counts in the eyes of Google. My personal advice is to work on your Yahoo Account to a certain level where you can make all your links live/clickable.
I don't think Google is capable of differentiating between non clickabe links and normal text. Google bots follow clickable links and add them into its link graph.
Definitely google will not follow a text. I think the better question is if google follows a nofollow link. Could it be that we're just wasting time here because digitalpoint is a nofollow forum?
If you are pertaining into dropping a link to Yahoo, you sure should read yahoo answers' community guidelines. There you can read on how are you able to make the links you put into it clickable. Though I am sure that you cannot use any anchor text on it, but making a reputation on those kind of answer sites helps a lot for your website.
Getting backlinks from Yahoo Answers might be of little help as these are no-followed link but they provide short term traffic. You need to mix it with other techniques for website promotion.
Um - sooooo you have just admitted that your only purpose of being here is to gain links? Because DP is not for communicating, getting advice, providing valuable solutions or for being a valued contributor - it's sole purpose is being a link farm is it? I think you have DP wrong - just like 90% of other spammers that share this view point - so yeas you are just wasting your time if you are trying to gain links or promote your site - pack your bags and fuck off with the other 100k spammers that share these same values and DP would be a much better place.
Whether or not he's trying to gain some links is not the issue. Actually, working on a nofollow link has always been a debate whether it's useful or otherwise. However, aside from being a nofollow forum, he should know that there are lots of better things he can do at DP aside from putting links in the sig area.
Anything other than a natural link - is a waste of time in my opinion, if the majority of webmasters spent the time on their own sites - that they spend on others - they may actually achieve something and have a decent website. For example a good ratio is 95% of time spent on your own site and 5% spent on others - how ever the reality is that these noobs spend 5% of the time on their sites and 95% of time on other peoples websites... which equates to a lot more content on other sites when it should have been on their own.
I think there are differing opinions, there are some that suggests Google and the other search engines, do count plain text as a backlink, but then again there is no official stance from Google on this
I've been advised that Google spiders do give consideration to NOFOLLOW links. Initially, when all the DOFOLLOW vs NOFOLLOW hype came about, Google was not giving any credit to NOFOLLOW links. However, Google discovered that by doing this, it adversely affected the quality of the search engine results, so they decided to give credit to both DOFOLLOW and NOFOLLOW links. I think it's more of Google check to determine if a site is building natural links or not. A backlink structure comprised of nothing but DOFOLLOW links would appear unnatural in Google's eye's as opposed to a backlink structure with a mixture of both types of links. Non-clickable links, however, will not add any benefit to your backlink structure since they are plain text and not followed by the spiders. A while back, I checked all the sites that were linked to one of my main sites. What I found was that several sites did not show up in the link structure... I suspect this was because the links had been converted to plain text, thereby making them non-clickable.
Thanks for the input. Whether google rates them or not is still debatable. Personally from what I've seen since this post, I'm inclined to say yes it does, because I hit page 1 position 4 within 5 days...well lets say they don't seem to PUNISH you for them. I know bing certainly loves them, because they indexed it within hours and its still there today.