rel="nofollow" vs "INDEX, NOFOLLOW"

Ok I know this might be a stupid question but here goes. A few competitors of mine have their site listed on a PR7 site that has <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> in the header but the links do not have rel="nofollow"? I have more links than them but they are still beating me? Are they getting credit from this PR7 site they have their link on although it applies a <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> in the header? The page is listed in Google's index but doesn't "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" mean that spiders should not index or even give credit to links on that page?

Thanks

 

This is not a stupid question, it means you are paying attention

Google follows meta 'noindex' but doesn't follow meta nofollow, they follow/crawl the links. (I have read it on their blog once.)

You are getting the PR juice from these pages, if they were rel=nofollow, you should be concerned.

 

this is really tedious question, can u clarify something

 

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> This is mean google crawls and indexes this page but doesn't pass page rank through any links from this page.

 

If there is a nofollow in the header, it means apply that nofollow to all links on that page, so no pagerank is passed under this scenario.

 

That's not correct. Please don't misguide people if you are not clear about something. Go through this post on google webmaster blog to see what google does with meta nofollow.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

 

Thanks everyone for responding.

jitendraag,
If I get a link on this PR7 page that has the "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" does it benefit my site in any way? What I have read it does not benefit page rank (as quoted below) but how about SE positioning?

NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents Googlebot from following an individual link.)

Thanks..

 

You have got it exactly the other way around. Meta - nofollow has no impact on passing pagerank. When it's <a rel=nofollow' that's when you should worry about PR not being passed.

 

Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

So what would you do if you had the chance to get a one way link on a PR7 site with "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" in the meta? Would you do it or just pass on it?

 

Very interesting conversation.. I really love this thread, this is much helpful to me knowing this kind of link relations.