Does Google honour rel="nofollow"

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

Just reviewing my backlinks in Webmaster Tools and notice some from wikipedia which are rel="nofollow".

3 years ago on the official Google blog it was said that Google would not crawl these and would not credit them in an attempt to cut out comment spam. They encouraged blog and forum software writers to make rel="nofollow" the default if their software allowed links in comments.

I'm interested in what you think is the current situation, has someone at Googleplex accidentally switched the nofollow instruction off? Or are they sensing blogs and forums and only honouring the instruction on these?

Cheers

Sid

[tedster]

I think it's highly unlikely that rel="nofollow" has been switched off in the scoring, even by accident - especially since nofollow later became such a key player in Google's war against paid links that pass PR.

Still, I do know what you mean. In some of the more spammed out SERPs, something about backlink scoring looks very funny right now.

[jimbeetle]

Matt commented on this during G's webmaster chat a few weeks ago:

we don't follow nofollow links, but we do include nofollow links in the webmaster console just to give webmasters a full picture of all the stuff that's linking to them.

[TheMadScientist]

There is also a recent thread you might get something out of here:
Nofollow links showing up in backlinks [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: TheMadScientist at 6:26 pm (utc) on April 19, 2008]

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

I just found this:

14. How do I tell Googlebot not to crawl a single outgoing link on a page?

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. For example a link,

<a href=http://www.example.com/>This is a great link!</a>

could be replaced with

<a href=http://www.example.com/ rel="nofollow">I can't vouch for this link</a>.

here:

[scholar.google.com...]

Cheers

Sid