Nofollow Links in Yahoo Answers Appear in Webmaster Console

so, do they count or not?

[mcglynn]

Links that appear in answers posted to Yahoo Answers are tagged with 'nofollow,' presumably to prevent linkbuilders from turning the YA service into a massive link farm. However, despite the nofollow tag, YA pages that point to my site regularly show up in the Webmaster Console, under the 'Links' tab.

I suppose the reason for this is that the Webmaster Console is simply showing a comprehensive list of inbound links, without attempting to eliminate low-value or nofollow links that wouldn't feed into Google's relevance ranking algorithm.

But it seems odd to me that Google would go to the trouble to index and track all these links if it _isn't_ using them in any other way.

[jimbeetle]

Well, that sure puts what Matt Cutts recently said [webmasterworld.com] about nofollow in a strange light. If what Matt said is correct, the only possibility that I can come up with that makes any sense at all is that the links were indexed before being nofollowed. Is that possible in this case? Are these links from older posts? Or are we now just thoroughly confused?

[edited by: tedster at 5:57 pm (utc) on Sep. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] fix link [/edit]

[mcglynn]

I had the same question you point out -- could the nofollow attribute be a recent addition to YA, and could the inbound links I'm seeing in the webmaster console predate this change?

The answers to both are "no."

A google search for [yahoo answers nofollow] points to pages from March of this year that mention the use of nofollow within YA.

The Webmaster Console shows me inbound links to my site from YA pages that were created less than a month ago.

So, it's clear that Google _is_ seeing nofollow links within YA pages, and is crediting them in some sense to the destination sites. Whether these links are used in relevance rankings or within Google's internal pagerank calculation remains unknown (and likely unknowable).

[reprint]

I thought there was a recent comment from Matt (was it?) that nofollow means the links are dropped completely from the linkmap. I have to say that i do not trust the webmaster tools links because they are usually out of date and incomplete. Yahoo site explorer seems to me to be more accurate. Do they show there?

[mcglynn]

Yes, Yahoo Site Explorer shows Yahoo Answers pages as "inlinks" to my site. That doesn't surprise me nearly as much as the fact that Google shows them.

Regarding the freshness of the inbound links in the webmaster console -- note that a timestamp is shown. I'm looking at a webmaster console page showing 30 links to my site; 28 of the 30 are Yahoo Answers pages, and every one of them shows a "last found" date within the past 2 weeks.

[jimbeetle]

I thought there was a recent comment from Matt (was it?) that nofollow means the links are dropped completely from the linkmap.

Yeah, see the link to the WebmasterWorld thread in my post above. That's why this is a bit of a surprise.

[Miamacs]

[I should learn to read properly.]

Google only shows inter-domain links with nofollow, and only to pages that are indexed otherwise.

Yahoo! crawls nofollowed links.

[edited by: Miamacs at 6:59 pm (utc) on Sep. 7, 2007]

[tedster]

Google only shows inter-domain links with nofollow, and only to pages that are indexed otherwise.

Thanks Miamacs - that does make some sense.Now that you mention it, I can recall another report a while back that this was the case. The recent dust storm around nofollow makes it much more important to keep in mind.

So the answer is, apparenty, no - these links still don't count.