Google following a 'nofollow' link?

Discussion in 'Commission Junction' started by hanji, Jun 24, 2007.

0
  1. #1
    Hello

    Yesterday, I noticed a weird thing. It appears that Google spidered my site, but followed all my CJ links.

    I have two eBay affiliate store sites. Both break down products by category, and at the product level (showing individual auctions via RSS), the link will direct the user to eBay. I've masked the rover code and I'm handling it via ModRewrite and header() to direct back to eBay.

    My links all have rel="nofollow", but it appears that Google followed the links. I know this because of the logs, and the abnormal high count of clicks I had yesterday on the two sites. It also could have been another type of spider that's masquerading as Google though. I just wanted to throw this out there, in case I'm missing something.

    Thanks!
    hanji
     
    hanji, Jun 24, 2007 IP
  2. Micromag

    Micromag Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    1,757
    Likes Received:
    67
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    165
    #2
    Do you use AdWords? I think that AdsBot-Google ignores nofollow tags.
     
    Micromag, Jun 24, 2007 IP
  3. hanji

    hanji Peon

    Messages:
    612
    Likes Received:
    16
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #3
    I am using AdWords on these two domains. So this is fine? Or do I need to put additional measures to stop the follow and CJ clicks? This is the first time I've seen this happen.

    Thanks!
    hanji
     
    hanji, Jun 24, 2007 IP
  4. alemcherry

    alemcherry Guest

    Best Answers:
    0
    #4
    Google says:
    It may not be a good idea to do so, since adsbot is meant to check the landing page quality and banning it might affect your quality rating. You can easily identify the adsbot and googlebot from the useragent in logs.

    I think even googlebot might actually follow the nofollow links to know what is going on. It will not obviously give any "PR juice" to the nofollow links, but google would definitely be inetrested to know where you are linking to. Excessive affiliate links might affect the trust rank / spam rating of your page, even if you have nofollow.
     
    alemcherry, Jun 25, 2007 IP
  5. Brewster

    Brewster Active Member

    Messages:
    489
    Likes Received:
    13
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    60
    #5
    The nofollow doesnt tell spiders not to follow the link. It is a tag to tell the spiders that the link is unmoderated by the site owner.

    Brew
     
    Brewster, Jun 25, 2007 IP
  6. stevemdr

    stevemdr Peon

    Messages:
    55
    Likes Received:
    1
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #6
    pretty deep
     
    stevemdr, Jun 26, 2007 IP
  7. sin

    sin Peon

    Messages:
    244
    Likes Received:
    5
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #7
    nofollow doesn't mean Google will not follow the link. It follows it and it even spiders the other site. I tested this with a brand spanking new site I wanted to get indexed in Google and placed a link to it from one of my PR5 sites. This PR 5 site is a forum that has rel="nofollow" in all the posts. My new site got indexed in Google 4 days after purchasing the domain. I didn't do any extra promotion.

    I think nofollow tells the search engines not to give the other site any PR benefits. There are some heated discussions out there as to what nofollow does.
     
    sin, Jun 28, 2007 IP