Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I would think that as long as you link to a resource you automatically help building up their PR, but now I heard a colleague thinking that nofollow will prevent this.
What is your opinion?
On the other hand, I'd tend to to agree with your argument... ;-)
When talking to different SEO people about the rel=”nofollow” tag, one gets different opinions as to what it does.
Here are some words of wisdom gleaned from several sources.
“When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner”
And then here are three other pieces:
“When a search engine sees a 'no-follow' tag in an HTML link, it will not follow it, or assign link popularity to the destination page.”
“Google's 'no-follow' tag recommendation applies only to comments and signature links in blogs. Links with rel=”nofollow” tags in web pages are followed, indexed and weighted.”
“If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:
1.NOT follow through to that page.
2.NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3.NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.
As for PageRank calculations, it's important to remember that PageRank is a pure popularity score. The nofollow attribute means that a link will not be counted as a "vote" in this popularity contest. That can have an impact on ranking, in cases where the impact of other factors beyond pure popularity come into play.”
Note that the advice given by the comments above is contradictory. Which is/are correct?
What does “not explicitly approved” really mean to a web site when it comes to search engine ranking?
Does a link in my web page that goes to another web site transfer or reduce the page rank of my web page?
If I link to another web site but use the nofollow tag, does that improve their page rank?
Why is it that there is conflicting information? Is the nofollow tag in a state of flux or interpreted differently by different search engines?
Google's 'no-follow' tag recommendation applies only to comments and signature links in blogs.
No. If you have read Matt Cutts' blog, he applauds the use of nofollow also in other cases like buying links.
And at the same time they are saying that the nofollow tag is a no vote type tag that seems to imply that the party linking to the site either does not recommend the site or does not vouch for the site. This implication seems to say that the site to which one is linking is in some way unclean.
Now isn’t that nice for advertisers? They pay for an advertising link to get traffic, they get a no follow tag that says that they are in some way unclean. Wonderful way to discourage web sites from competing with Google by selling advertising!
Does a link in my web page that goes to another web site transfer or reduce the page rank of my web page?
In other words, if we have a page with PR of 7 linking to another page, the other page gets its PR raised with, say 0.001.
The figures above of cause just an example and have nothing to do with the real ones.
your page's PR is not affected in any way by linking to another page
If the linked-to page gets penalised - eg: for duplicate content - and loses its pagerank, can't that get passed back to the page with the link?
Have a quick search for "page rank leak" in the big g...
Chubba loves ya.
Now isn’t that nice for advertisers? They pay for an advertising link to get traffic, they get a no follow tag that says that they are in some way unclean.
How so? The nofollow tag just means the link doesn't get followed or counted. The linked site isn't being penalized in any way. There's no implication that the linked site is "unclean," because the nofollow tag is hidden in the source code.
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
I don't see this as a devious plot... it's just an option to be used or not used, including on one's own site.
your page's PR is not affected in any way by linking to another page
That's definitely not true, and linking to another page on one's own site can make the linking page's PageRank go up as well as down. PageRank calculations are often very interesting and quite a surprise.
