Interesting, I was just checking links in the webmaster tools and went to look at one and the link was nofollow (it was a blog comment) so what's up with google? Do they count nofollows? If so, that would put a whole new spin on the link buying/selling penalty issue. Lisa Screenshot on request
Nofollow is a misnomer of sorts...they will follow the link as bots and for indexing. It's just that PR and other SERP effecting attributes won't apply.
It's interesting that they include it in your links section in the webmaster tools - it would be nice if they'd just include the ones that count towards your 'rating' for backlinks. Lisa
I think it's interesting that I have over 2000 links in webmaster tools but only 14 via the LINK: command. I'm actually unsure if Google even knows what nofollow means I'd almost like to say they added it to make the average webmaster & blogger "happy".
I think they just like to f*ck with our heads. They probably count E V E R Y T H I N G and just make up new rules to mess us up
I wouldnt doubt Google if they started counting nofollow links. I'm afraid that they might penalize sites that give nofollows to other relevant sites they link to...so if a quality finance site links to a quality finance blog with a nofollow they'd be penalized.. this is just something that came to my mind once..and now i'm paranoid..haha
I would be rather surprised if they did that, though I'd really not put it passed them. I'll not be getting paranoid about it, but would giggle about WIKI getting hurt, and those now linking back to WIKI with nofollow.
Nofollow, despite the name is meant to be followed. As Qryztufre rightly said, there's no link juice passed, however. If you don't want the page indexed you can either use the noindex attribute or simply pop it in your robots.txt if it's an internal link
Yes, this was an external link to my site - that's what made me double take - Google has it listed in the links to my site. Lisa
even if google wont follow from sites with nofollow it will still follow from other without nofollow.
Iv'e studied it and they have no effect whatsoever on Google and Yahoo rankings, I am pretty sure they work with MSN though!
They put a lot of links in google webmaster tools including no-followed links. But Matt Cutts specifically warned that not all links that are shown are counted equally. I'm pretty sure he meant these links as well as links that count way more then others do, because they are on trusted sites. There have been enough tests on this: rel no follow links do pass their description on, especially in case of rare keywords. But they don't otherwise improve rankings.
when I dont want search engines to see a link I use: javascript:var handle=window.open('http://www.url.com/') not better then rel="nofollow" ??
Seems the nofollow tag is for the benefit of not leaking PR from your own pages, and I think I still see benefit from obviously nofollow links... Hmmm. Anyone else see this?