Is no-follow considered a backlink?

I know that if a link is no-follow, pagerank is not passed through. But is it still considered a backlink, in terms of helping you in the eyes of search engines.

 

No nofollow link is not considered as a backlink in google. However, there is no such attribute in yahoo and MSN so it might help there..

 

Nofollow link is useless. The only its use can be traffic that it may generate if placed properly.

 

I disagree with the comments above. Although Google claims to not pass pagerank with nofollow links, I have seen people reporting seeing nofollow links show up in their list of backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools. So they might still be helping Google rankings. I have heard that Yahoo and MSN are now acknowledging the nofollow tag, but Yahoo still lists nofollow links in siteexplorer. So it is up in the air whether those search engines credit such links or not. Nofollow links are definitely not useless. At the very least, they can provide quality direct traffic and help develop brand recognition.

 

sorry but i completely disagree with this. No follow link is not useless and moreover traffic is the only thing that every webmaster wants.

There are various blogs, which have some high numbers of traffic and posting some goo comments on them can really be useful in divert some traffic.

 

It appears in list of backlinks, but the authority of linking site does not transfer to the site linked.

 

Sorry but you are just going on the assumption that all search engines are strictly not giving credit for nofollow links. I don't think this is necessarily the case. When link building for one of my newer websites, I built some nofollow links and I think they did help rankings. Just because a link is nofollow, it does not mean it is useless. That is poor logic that spammers usually use.

 

if you consider WIKIPEDIA its has no-follow tag but source a good amount of web traffic.
I use WIKI always.

NO FOLLOW MIGHT BE NOT GOOD FOR PR but it helps in some time in good traffic
I don't waste my time in seeing whether they are "NO FOLLOW OR NOT" > I Need various mouth(free)for advertisement.

 

Google has stated emphatically on numerous occasions that adding rel="nofollow" to a link causes no PR to be passed to the target URL and causes the link to NOT help the target URL rank in any way.

Here's the official post for bloggers back when they originally invented the "nofollow" use of the rel= attribute on links http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html. Note the 1st paragraph:

I mean, the whole reason rel="nofollow" was even invented was to combat blog comment spam... to prevent spammers from placing backlinks on blog comments pointing back to their sites (or their clients' sites) to increase their rankings. They didn't JUST do it to prevent them from increasing their PR. They did it to prevent them from spamming their way to the top of SERPs. And anyone who knows anything about SEO will know that PR has almost zero affect on how a URL ranks for a particular keyword phrase so the main goal would be to prevent them from getting credit for the link and the associated link text and the relevance of the page linking to them and yada yada yada.

In this post from 2007 you can see Googler Adam Lasnick respond to this question:

to which he responds:

which means they literally don't evan crawl the link. They might discover and index the page via some other link but never via a nofollowed link.

Matt Cutts has also stated it on numerous occasions that PR is not passed AND a nofollowed link will NOT affect the target URLs rankings. I'll bet I've heard him explain it 50 times in person at the last 2 Pubcons in Vegas. He has to be sick of the question by now.

Here's a VERY recent video by Matt Cutts about nofollow where at about 56 seconds in he says:

If a nofollowed link from wikipedia won't help your rankings then a nofollow link from joe blow's blog is certainly not going to count for anything. Nofollowed links from wikipedia can help your rankings indirectly like by getting you lots of traffic which in turn can get you followed links from other sites. But the wikipedia link itself will not help you rank.

Yes. Google shows nofollowed links in the output of their link: operator AND in WMT, but they also show links from pages which are clearly under penalty and also not being counted in the ranking algorithm. It's just a sample of the known links, not a sample of the ones that 'count'.

They may help rankings in other search engines, but sorry... not at Google.

 

Another great post Canonical. Thanks for answering the question.

 

What you mean by placed properly?
Can you explain us how to do it? In a few words for sure.
Thanks.

 

I think he means if you put it on a relevant site then more people would be likely to click on your comment link... so you get more traffic.

 

Sound very interesting... what you mean by relevant site? Can I have an example? I'm sorry to be so dumb.

 

not true. As I've been saying for a while now, if you trust google to implement that 'rule' cleanly, you don't understand how software (or Google, for that matter!) works.

Also, google isn't the only search engine. How fo you think Yahoo, for example, treats the 'nofollow' tag?

 

nofollow links are still counted in google backlinks. They just don't pass PR link juiced.

 

Yuniti for example is a no follow social community but blogs from Yuniti appears on Google top pages

 

No-follow attribute is considered as backlinks by yahoo and other search except Google bacause Google like do-follow attributes.

 

where can i find more info about no-follow and do-follow?

 

I agree with you. End of day everybody needs traffic only but some of us should focus on PR only. PR does't help you for increasing the SERP and traffic also.

No follow links will give you the good traffic to your site.

 

1) Nofollow does show up in backlink tools.
2) Nofollow is not as good as an incontent dofollow link but it good nonetheless.
3) It helps in your link diversity..

U don;t want tooooo many links from only dorectories or 1000 dofollow links from comments.
Have nofollow in your link profile will make it more genuine..

Just my two cents..