I know this might have been covered by others and it is an ongoing story.I always used third parties tools to chec backlinks. Now I checked on Google Webmaster and it lists 5 backlinks from fodors, which is high value in my niche. Surprised I found that some people have posted a natural link to my site (people who actually visited the activity and reported on the fodors forum). All fine at that point. I was surprised that fodors fourm were dofollow. I checked and the were NOFOLLOW!So either Google webmaster is showing also nofollow link, or google takes into account nofollow. Anybody have had evidence of google using nofollow on link count?
I also noticed that Google started adding nofollow links into the GWT link reports after the first Penguin update in April 2012. Moreover, I even found the links through redirects as well as just a URL written as a plain text instead of a link. I'm not sure if Google counts these links but they evidently pay attention to the fact of such "external factors" that point to the website. I think that it could be a part of defining the site's popularity and therefore its rankings in the SERP.
I thought is already knew that no-follow is just a way google discourages spam but nofollow links count as do-follow ones.
That does not make sense, if nofollow counts as dofollow, then spam is not discouraged at all! I write on dofollow forums to get backlinks (not spamming as my comments get all approved), but if nofollow counts the same, I wold also comment on nofollow forums which usually don't have approval as you would only comment or post if you are truly interested in the discussion since you are not getting any benefit on google ranking.
It would be a mess in the SERPs if Google started to count all nofollow links as dofollow These links just add "natural value" to overall back links profile. I guess this fact is counted somehow in the algorithm. Nofollow links are usually really natural links that pass real traffic instead of the SEO value and Google can't ignore this fact.
Even if it's nofollow, still it's a valid inbound link. (Real users can click that link and visit your site) That's the reason Google list it under "Links to Your Site". But Google bots wont count them when calculating PR or wont visit your site through that links.
yes ! and not only that the noindex pages and pages that are in robots.txt file are still indexed ! I do not know what the hell of Google point of view of that !
This cant be true. For me, whatever the links I disallow in robots.txt, are disappearing from Google index within 1 week.
search google "description could not be loaded because the website robots.txt file prvented Google bot from crawling content"
I think G shows no-follow links in webmaster tools, just to confuse webmasters who are 'collecting' no-follows, but they don't 'count' it.
Google is 100% ignoring the no follows on FB pages, I got a page rank 0 jump to 2 earlier this month because it's linked on my FB page that is popular, I've never placed a link anywhere else. The FB page itself has a PR3.
well Well which one is it? are they ignoring them (in your opinion) or are they passing link juice to your site...?
I meant they are ignoring the fact it's no follow and passing link juice as you say, I should have worded that better.
It's nothing new that Google shows these links in Webmaster Tools. What value do they carry? Well, I don't believe they pass PR, but I do believe they have some weight in terms of SEO, but minimal. Interesting blog posts on it: http://www.socialseo.com/blog/an-experiment-nofollow-links-do-pass-value-and-rankings-in-google.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/nofollow-links-google/27708/ http://sphinn.com/story/161185/ (This last one is more comments than a blog post.)
OK and here is the rest of the story. I checked my links and there are several that are not exisitng anymore! I used to post on some dofollow forums on cook sites now they all removed signature links but google Webmaster shows them. My conclusion is that webmaster (link pointing to the website page) is not interesting at all. Showing things that google does not count and non existing links. Just obsolete. I think they are doing this on purpose so people don't try to figure out what are links to build. By the way, why have this site also removed signature links? Not that I care much, just that I should have received some kind of notification!
Google will list all links that it finds. Imagine how many people would cry if it stopped doing that? If a link is no longer valid, it will eventually drop off the list. Read this: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/help/established
All links show up in Google Webmaster Tools, but Google Webmaster Tools does not make any distinctions between incoming links that pass link popularity and incoming links that don't.