Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I found a high PR site and I spoke to the owner regarding possibly advertising on his website.
He then went on to tell me that it would be no benefit to me because he instructed google to have a no follow link command on the page or links that where advertising.
Here is my question:
When I went to google and checked the sites advertising on this supposed no follow page of links, while doing a search on google if I include the advertisers url address and the site they are advertising on in the google search box, the advertisers link shows up in the backlinks.
example of search performed on Google:
widgets.com and xyzinfo.com
does this mean that even though they stated its a no follow page they are advertising on, Google in fact is following the link anyways?
How else would google include them as backlinks for those sites who are advertising?
I am asking this question because this site is a very big and popular authority site and probably would help with rankings.
If it was indeed a true no follow link.....should it not show up at all on the google backlinks?
If it was indeed a true no follow link...
There should be no mystery about that. Did you View Source?
Google says the nofollow will stop PR from passing. But I suppose they could still show it as a link, even so.
So take from that what you can.
I was told by the owner if you place your link advertisement on this page, the link will have a nofollow command.
However like I stated earlier when I include the site of the url who is doing the advertising and associate it with the site that is promoting these links, when I do a search on google, the page and the advertisers link comes up!
If there is supposed to be a no follow, then why would it come up at all. I don't understand.
The ONLY thing it means is: do not pass any recommendations. Don't pass a vote.
Otherwise it's the same link.
Except that it's virtual. It's there but it doesn't count as for trust, pagerank and relevance.
It will be shown with link: commands.
It will be included in your linking pattern profile.
The only thing it won't do, is pass on the trust, pagerank and relevance.
I don't mean to act as if I was the one who invented its use, but I've been monitoring it for a while. And the fact that "Matt Cutts" said that all Wiki links now being nofollow won't change much on the net seems to support this as in: the linking pattern of Wiki did NOT change overnight from 10 million+ outbounds to 0. It stayed the same, 10 million+. It was the receiving party that might have been "hit".
Go to Yahoo if you don't believe me.
They show the nofollow links as backlinks.
Although they don't count.
Now, NOFOLLOW in the META is different.
That means: Don't even crawl the links on this page!
And they don't. Period.
OK fine, I believe that. However, I still believe if you do have a link on this authority type site.....Google, Yahoo whoever must realize the respectiblity of sites advertising on it, right?
You can tell me till your blue in the face that "no follow" tells search engines not to cast their vote, however clearly the results of these sites listed on this popular respected authority sites still obtains the benefits such as higher PR and better rankings.
I have been doing some research and even though "no follow" is in use benefits of PR and Rankings still have improved.
Just for the record, when I state authority site, I am referring to websites that are considered the "Holy Grail" of Internet Repectibility.
I am not talking about sites who self proclaim or promote themselfs as authority sites. I am talking the "Real Deal Sites."
A site is able to link to potentially infinite external sites, but no vote is given for the sites to which you link. Don't the search engines find this suspicious if overused? After all, shouldn't you stand behind your link suggestions to external sites or not link to them at all?
Or is this not part of the evaluation process as far as you can tell?
I am excluding issues faced by blogs and forums in terms of gratuitous links...
You can tell me till your blue in the face that "no follow" tells search engines not to cast their vote, however clearly the results of these sites listed on this popular respected authority sites still obtains the benefits such as higher PR and better rankings.
"Clearly"? How so? Do you have a way of eliminating all the other variables that affect PR and rankings? If so, you can make a fortune selling that information. :-)
Of course it is.
That links with nofollow pass on pagerank, trust, relevance?
Perhaps on every thursday from 4 pm to 5 pm, who knows?
One thing is for sure, links with rel nofollow show up in link profiles.
They're in Yahoo, in Google, and whether they are/were/sometimes are/sometimes are not devalued by their attribute may even be up to some bug in an offline parsing program.
[edited by: Miamacs at 8:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2007]
If the following:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
<title>Support Widget ABCXYZ Page</title>
Does that mean the entire page will not be listed on the search engines?
What is the difference between the meta tag with a no follow and a link with a no follow?
If the link is on the above page, what benefit does it have? Will this page still pass any pagerank to sites that have links on them?
META TAG is page wide. NOFOLLOW attribute is link specific.
NOFOLLOW tag around a link means no vote, but links are actually followed and noted, just no weight is passed.
It really should be rel NOVOTE...
Whereas meta ROBOTS NOFOLLOW stops the content on an entire page from being indexed.
If this site is using a robots meta tag of noindex, they are not doing what Google suggested, which is a rel="nofollow" attribute in anchor tag of the purchased link.
Ok still looking for some clarificationIf the following:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
<title>Support Widget ABCXYZ Page</title>Does that mean the entire page will not be listed on the search engines?
No, the page will be listed (indexed), but the links from the page will not be followed and/or credited.
we're showing all the links -- although some of them may have a nofollow attribute. We do, of course, process the nofollow as well in those cases. So, no worries if you see those links listed in the tool.[webmasterworld.com...]
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
Is or is not pagerank passed for links on this page pointing out to specific url's?
It appears there are two schools of thought on this. I have yet to hear a definite answer to this question.
Also, will google (if this no follow page has high PR) continue to come back time and time again and spider this page knowing the page includes a nofollow idex?
Will the cache page indicate the frequent crawls?
Is it possible for google to say ok we have been here many times before and we know not to index this page, so we won't bother reading whats on it.
Would that mean that any new links added may not ever get crawled on that page?
Whats the rule of thumb on a High PR page that includes the <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
Will it continue to get crawled? Does it pass pagerank?
2. The robots meta tag with a NOFOLLOW value will keep all the links on that page from being followed. So as long as there is absolutely NO other path to the target page, then the target page's content will not be indexed. But the url still may accumulate PR, and if it does show up in a SERP because of backlinks and PR alone, then it will be "url-only" - no title and no snippet.
3. Googlebot will continue to spider -- especially when the meta tag value is INDEX. Even using NOINDEX in the robots meta tag can't possibly mean "don't even look" -- they've got to look in order to read it! The only way to achieve "don't even look" is with robots.txt
In my experience, googlebot visits may get far between, but if the url resolves, they never give up. Even long after a 404 response, the bot keeps on checking.
2. The robots meta tag with a NOFOLLOW value will keep all the links on that page from being followed. So as long as there is absolutely NO other path to the target page, then the target page's content will not be indexed. But the url still may accumulate PR, and if it does show up in a SERP because of backlinks and PR alone
Tedster,
Are you sure about accumulating PR?
My understanding is that <META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="nofollow"> and <a href=http://www.example.com/ rel="nofollow"> should behave in the same way.
The only difference is additional control when dealing with individual links by using "rel=".
From what I have read, it is not true that the meta tag and the attribute behave the same in Google's ranking system - have you seen an authoritative reference to support your understanding? I'm alway delighted to correct any wrong ideas I'm carrying around.
Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page, but you can also instruct Googlebot not to crawl individual links by adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink. When Google sees the attribute rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.
It indeed specifically states that 'rel="nofollow"' doesn't pass PR, but my impression here is that they don't differ between the two in that sense.
What Tedster said does have merrit. If a link does not include the rel="nofollow" after the hyperlink this link will pass on pagerank to the target url regardless if the page has "Index,NoFollow" in place.
Also I think by setting it up with "Index,NoFollow" both parties benefit. The advertiser gets what he wants, which is improved pagerank, while the webpage that is providing the advertising space gets compensation for these links without the worries of these pages getting index.
I never gave it much thought before, but I think you will all agree it is worth getting to the bottom of this.
[64.233.167.104...]
Danny Sullivan asks:
Matt, in the interview, you suggest that Google now views meta robots with a nofollow value as being the same as the completely different nofollow attribute, in terms of flagging links as not trusted. Is that now the case?
The interview Danny refers to is here:
[battellemedia.com...]
Where Matt says:
You could add the rel="nofollow" attribute to a link, which tells search engines that you can't or don't want to vouch for the destination of a link. The W3C decided to add a "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" meta tag to their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on, but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page.
Matt answers:
Danny, that’s always been the case–sorry if I haven’t explained that well. There are many techniques to sell visitors/traffic without selling PageRank or affecting search engines. As long as a link doesn’t affect search engines, there is no problem with selling that link from Google’s perspective. The nofollow attribute on links is the most granular because it’s on a link level, but something like a sponsor page is a fine opportunity to use the nofollow meta tag instead of marking each link.
For example you say the W3C is using the "INDEX, NOFOLLOW" approach which allows this page to be indexed but does not affect the search results (Pagerank)
How can google crawl the entire page and index it but does not affect those links on that page?
If thats what's happening then the only way those links would not have any affect on search results would be the "rel=nofollow" after each and every link advertising.....Right?
Here is what the W3C is saying about this:
Question:
Will the link from the Supporters page improve my ranking by search engines?
Answer:
W3C makes no assurances that sites linked from the Supporters program will see improved ranking in search engine results. W3C instructs search engines to ignore links from the Supporters page.
Actually the W3C is instructing to ignore the page not the links. So then if the page is getting index (which it is) the only way to completely ignore the links is to add the "rel=nofollow" after every link...Right?
The way I see it pagerank is getting past in this example.
To be 100% accurate, Matt talks more generally about "affecting search engines." Still, we know there is some "affecting" going on because rel="nofollow" links can still show up in backlinks. I guess once the website gives Google this warning, they can put on their hazmat suits and make whatever use they want of the data without "being affected".
I do wish Matt's language were more precise here, but after all it is a transcribed interview, not a written piece.
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 6:22 am (utc) on Feb. 8, 2007]
