nofollow question

Does google follow it?

[ari11210]

What does google do when it hits a nofollow link at my site? Does it follow it and index it, but not pass PR, etc on to the linked page, or does it not follow it at all?

I have tracking for some outbound links at my site, so instead of the actual URL of the link, they are a link to a tracking script on my site which then forwards to the actual page. All of these links to the tracking script are coming up in the google index, and I would rather they didnt - I tried using nofollow on them to avoid this, but it doesnt seem to work. Is there anyway to do this?

Thanks
Aaron

[tedster]

Are you asking about rel="nofollow"? I believe that Google takes that to mean just don't transfer PR, but they still may check the link out and rank it according to other factors, including any other potential inboumd links.

If you mean a meta robots tag of "noindex,nofollow", then I don't believe Google will follow any links on that particular page. But if they occur anywhere else on the web, then they may be followed.

All of these links to the tracking script are coming up in the google index, and I would rather they didnt.

I think you'll need to do something more proactive here -- ban those links with robots.txt, for instance.

[ari11210]

Thanks, I was talking about the rel='nofollow' - I will try using robots.txt to stop these links from getting indexed.