How exactly does no-follow work? Does it basically make the link invisible to google? I am wondering this because, I created a subfolder on one of my sites with a one page mini site, and I only linked to it with a no-follow link, yet it's on the first page in google for it's keyword. I am wondering if the no-follow link still helped it get indexed?
Search engines can still find pages that aren't linked to all day, this is just how crawlers work. You need to disallow the web page via meta tags and your robots.txt to prevent indexing. The nofollow is used to prevent your site passing on any value to the URL provided. This means no pagerank, no seo weight, no nothing. It really isn't know if Googlebot still follows the link and crawls the site.
Google will still follow links tagged with nofollow for discovery. The only thing that changes is that the page linking with the nofollow link doesn't pass PR through that link.
To define nofollow on your site is very simple. The words you don't want to give weightage for that particular URL, then set it nofollow.
So do nofollow links affect the ranking of a site in Google? Like where the site is actually indexed at? If I were to go make 1,000 nofollow backlinks next month would it affect my standing at all?
according to me no follow links plays no role in link juice.Byt except google other search engine count both no follow as well as do follow backlinks.
A nofollow link is a link that is included on a webpage using standard html markup but includes an attribute to prevent passing link juice or reputation to the destination page. This type of link does not improve the link target search engine ranking.Google, Yahoo, and MSN all include nofollow links in site backlink counts. Google only shows a select few backlinks for each domain when using the link operator from the web interface. Google webmaster tools record of backlinks includes nofollow links even though they are absent using the link operator.