Google Webmaster Tools and how it values No Follow links

[Stefi]

I thought that webmaster only collated follow links, but when I looked at the page source of one of the backlinks to my site, it showed as "no follow". Does this mean that no follow links do have value? Has anybody else noticed this?

[Receptional Andy]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Stefi :)

My belief is that GWT data does not reflect links that pass value, merely links that Google is prepared to show, including many that demonstrably do not pass value. I do not believe there is any search engine value in a nofollow link, whether they appear in this report or not. Yahoo Site Explorer also shows nofollow links, incidentally.

[aristotle]

Google might use nofollow links in analyzing the overall link profile of a site. For example, suppose a site has 100 dofollow links but no nofollow links. This would be an unnatural distribution between dofollow and nofollow links, and thus an indication that artificial link building has occurred. As a result, the Google algo might devalue the dofollow links.

[Robert Charlton]

Note in this discussion about rel="nofollow" [webmasterworld.com] the Matt Cutts clarification regarding nofollow links reported in WMT...

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.

[aristotle]

So if you believe Matt Cutts, then in Google's algo a dofollow link from an obscure free directory counts for more than a nofollow link from the New York Times or Harvard University.

[Reno]

Matt Cutts: "we don't follow nofollow links..."

Am I not reading this correctly? I thought it was explained to us here in this Google forum (some time ago) that the link WAS followed, but it took no PR value with it. I seem to recall someone saying that the term "nofollow" was misleading for that very reason. Have things changed?

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