I was looking at my backlinks and saw a backlink I have on ycorpsblog.com for a blog comment on Yahoo!'s blog. They are doing rel=external nofollow. When I researched it, it still counts as a link and not as a nofollow, but that is to the script I am researching my backlinks. Does it still count as a link to Google or can Google recognize rel=external nofollow the same as rel=nofollow?
rel='external nofollow' is exactly the same as rel='nofollow'. The 'external' part just tells the search engine (or any other browser) that it's an external URL as well. Which I've always thought is pretty dumb because any browser could tell by looking at the href.
It may not pass any link juice from Google, but it is still considered a link Yahoo and Bing will still give your site credit for it NoFollow or Dofollow.... a link, is a link, is a link, is a link, is a link!!! They are all benificial in their own way!
I don't think external and nofollow are the same thing because wordpress adds on every link rel="external nofollow" if there where equal wordpress will add just one of them