Hi Everyone Does google follow the "no follow" command? What is the meaning of rel="nofollow" command? Thanks
Google takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page). Links with "nofollow" are included in the backlinks reporting data at Google's Webmaster Central.
Theres really no straight answer but from my experience...Google DOES follow "nofollow" links but they just won't pass any link juice
They are great for not worrying about adding links to bad and spam websites, most blogs use it nowadays.
I think nofollow was introduced to allow websites to sell links without being penalized by Google (don't take my word as gospel however). As far as I know it is so people could exchange and sell links without distorting the relevancy within the Google SERP's, and this also prevents people from exchanging and buying links purely for PageRank (PR). nofollow however is only relevant to Google's crawler and is NOT a web standard.
not true, no follow was introduced to help site fight spam and to stop site from dropping serps by falling victim to a spammer linking to a bad network.
nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.
my experience is google does follow and value "nofollow" links. IMO, google's claim that they do not give importance to "nofollow" links, is not fully correct. I have seen pages move up substantially in SERPs when they get "nofollow" links from important sites like wikipedia. "nofollow" links may be devalued, but they do pass some benefits.
even if google follow such links, the main point here is that, google don't count them in PR calculations. so I think, no follow links are of no use at all
I was also confused with "no follow" back then, about 3 or 4 weeks ago. Ibnuasad is definitely correct! Google does follow pages that has "no follow" on it, they will be crawled, however, it will not be given any link juice.