Does nofollow still really mean never follow?

[kieransimkin]

I'm going to suggest something here which I think is going to be pretty controversial and I'd like to hear your feedback.

I've observed over the last few months that Google seems to have loosened its definition of what the nofollow attribute actually means. In the past it has literally meant "ignore this link completely", then Matt Cutts announced in this blog post that for some time Google have been counting nofollow links as pagerank sinks (ie pagerank flows into them, it just doesn't go anywhere).

What I'm suggesting is that they may have made another alteration to the meaning of "nofollow" - What I think they're probably doing at the moment is counting a nofollow link as nothing at the moment it is created, and then the longer it stays online, the more pagerank flows over it, until some fixed point where a nofollow link is basically as good as a dofollow one.

Why would they do this? Well, nofollow was originally conceived to allow people to control the amount of link spam they received in comments, and for sites like Wikipedia to discourage people from spamming wiki articles with links. Basically, it's a spam control measure.

But let's take Wikipedia as an example - there's lots of links at the bottom of Wikipedia articles that are in fact valuable 'votes' in favour of the sites they link to. If the link has remained live on a Wikipedia article for a number of months, it's likely that the many people who've reviewed that article do indeed think that the link is valuable and not spam. Does it not therefore make sense for Google to count those links as pagerank votes? Could Google in fact be missing out on quite a lot of valuable ranking information by not including those links in its pagerank calculations?


What evidence do I have for this?

Well, it's mostly anecdotal - the most concrete thing I have is that Wikipedia links have started being included in the 'External links' section of Google's webmaster tools - has anyone else noticed this? Furthermore, I've noticed that other nofollow links have started showing up here as well, but they take considerably longer to show up than dofollow links.

It's just a hunch really, but I'd like to hear your feedback.

[regmac]

Well, I noticed nofollow links coming from some social bookmarking sites treated as backlinks as it is detailed in google webmaster tool.. (I don't know if this meant that google is considering something we webmasters/SEOs don't know)

But here's my conjecture:
I think google had a list of trusted nofollow social networking, social bookmarking and reputable sites. When you have your links on these sites, it enables them to monitor the flow (through click through monitoring) which could make them conclude that that link is somewhat relevant to the page and would therefore allow a certain value of PR to flow in even if the link is nofollow.

What makes me say this:
Well, my point is link relevancy. If the link (nofollow) is very much related to what the page is, it would have a higher click through possibility and something awards that in the background.

[Webfu]

Agreed, I think all search engines, not just Google are using the no follow data somehow.

What I'm suggesting is that they may have made another alteration to the meaning of "nofollow" - What I think they're probably doing at the moment is counting a nofollow link as nothing at the moment it is created, and then the longer it stays online, the more pagerank flows over it, until some fixed point where a nofollow link is basically as good as a dofollow one.

-- Something like this is happening IMO.

[bermuda]

Look NoFollow links can be very great indeed and a mistake many people make is assuming they to be really of no value but on the contrary, they can help with rankings a lot but they will not pass PR, that's all.

[angilina]

Originally Posted by kieransimkin

I'm going to suggest something here which I think is going to be pretty controversial and I'd like to hear your feedback.

I've observed over the last few months that Google seems to have loosened its definition of what the nofollow attribute actually means. In the past it has literally meant "ignore this link completely", then Matt Cutts announced in this blog post that for some time Google have been counting nofollow links as pagerank sinks (ie pagerank flows into them, it just doesn't go anywhere).

I think that a link with no follow tag will not have any PR Juice or any other ranking value.

What Matt Cutts said was that: if a page [Lets Say Page A] have 20 links on it. 10 are do follow where 10 are no followed. In the past, the 10 do follow links used to get all the PR juice. Lets say that this page has 20 units of PR juice to give.

In the past, the 10 do follow links used to get 2 PR juice points each. But now, Google has changed things and the 10 do follow links now gets only one PR juice point.

Google has done this to stop people from controlling the PR flow. People have used the no follow tag to give more PR juice to the links that are dofollow. That is not possible these days.

The 10 PR juice points for Page A will be wasted. Matt Cutts explained this matter in a similar way and he clearly mentioned that PR Juice will be wasted when no follow tag will be used instead of being transfered to the do followed links.

Also, I saw a recent video where Matt Cutts clearly said that Google do not give any credit for no follow links. Even if they come from wikipedia.

[kre8or]

Google keeps changing the "game" so often, eh?...its hard to keep up with them...and of course MOST of the time, they don't publicly announce the changes, now do they?

[sabqat]

actually google want quality & unique contect on every site for the same they change their policies.