playing around with a new site this morning and noticed that WMT is showing a "no follow" link from the big Wiki website.
Thoughts? Why would WMT be showing a no-followed link, is it because it's from a page on the big wiki site?
aristotle
3:18 pm on Aug 17, 2010 (gmt 0)
WMT has been showing nofollow links for several years, and from all types of sites. It indicates that Google keeps them in its database, but doesn't necessarily mean that they are used in the rankings algorithm. In fact Google appears to say that they aren't used.
limoshawn
3:56 pm on Aug 17, 2010 (gmt 0)
I guess I've always thought of WMT as google specific, but maybe I should consider WMT a more generic information source, they show the links, even the ones that don't matter to the search engine.
indyank
1:24 pm on Aug 18, 2010 (gmt 0)
Yes, WMT has been showing nofollow links for several years now...
and Yahoo answers are adding nofollow to all links.Can anyone tell from when is this happening?
Rlilly
1:32 pm on Aug 18, 2010 (gmt 0)
How are we so sure Google does not count no-follow links? Why would they not, especially links from authoratitive pages?
tedster
3:07 pm on Aug 18, 2010 (gmt 0)
First, there are quite a few people in the industry who test this (using anchor text) and I know we'd hear a loud cry if rel=nofollow links started being counted for link juice.
And second, Google reps have gone to great pains to emphasize that nofollow links are completely "dropped from the webgraph". These are the people who created the attribute in the first place, and its use is extremely common in user generated content, which was it's first application. It would wreak major havoc for Google to begin ignoring their own creation.
