SEO effect of nofollowed anchor text on classified ad sites?

[Oimachi2]

Would anchor text on classifieds sites help for SEO?

Sites like craigslist, ebay, backpage ect...

Do no follow anchor text help even at all?

[Robert Charlton]

Just to clarify... is the question about whether nofollowed anchor text might help the source page rank, or whether it might help the target page rank?

[Oimachi2]

No page rank because no follow.

I mean this:

The targe page is widget.html

The anchor text is "widget" but it's no follow.

Will it still help you rank high for widget as if it was dofollow?


THanks

[aakk9999]

According to Google, it does not have any impact on the target page. From [support.google.com...]

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

But note the "In general..." at the start of the sentence quoted above.

There are some speculations that nofollow anchor text may count in a similar way as "citations".

There are also opinions that anchor text of nofollow links may be passed to the target page. Some test on this were done in the past and the results published, but it is not conclusive as various tests showed different results. It should be also borne in mind the date such tests were performed as the handling may have changed since.

[Oimachi2]

Thanks for the reply guys.

But I think I'm not explaining well...!

I don't care about page rank, from what I understand nofollow only applies to page rank?

How about this scenario:

1. I have an html document with this keyword phrase included in the text, H1 tag and title:

"blue cats in Toronto that eat rice on a Sunday morning"

2. I put a link to that page on a website as nofollow with the anchor text:

"blue cats in Toronto that eat rice on a Sunday morning"

linking to my page.


Will Google take into consideration that single anchor text link and index and rank my page?

Or will Google completely ignore that anchor text and not index that page at all?





Thanks

[aakk9999]

Will Google take into consideration that single anchor text link and index and rank my page?

Or will Google completely ignore that anchor text and not index that page at all?

The target page that has link to it nofollowed may be indexed if Google discovers this page some other way (other links, etc.) But indexing is not the same as ranking - the page that is indexed may or may not be ranking.

According to Google (from the larger quote in the message above), then (emphasis mine)

...Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links....

However, as I mentioned in the earlier post, there were some tests done in the past where the page A had a link to page B with link nofollowed and unique anchor text. In some tests the target page (B) did come up in search for that anchor text, in other tests it did not. Also, these tests were done some year(s) back so it may not be the same now.

[Oimachi2]

Thanks aakk9999

I guess I'll conduct the test myself and see if it works.

Another questions this brings to me is this:

If you publish an html document but have absolutely NO links pointing to it, not from index file, not from sitemap, not from anywhere.

Will Google still find it on it's own? Or will the page be "anonymous" and never found?

[aakk9999]

From my own experience I would say yes - at least for some of such pages.

Or better - you cannot assume it will not, but you cannot assume it will either.

I have worked with some custom CMS where admin login page got leaked to Google despite not having ANY links pointing to it and where admin login page URL was not something obvious such as www.example.com/admin.

But I also saw orphan pages that Google never got to.

If you do not want page indexed, use noindex. You can also use robots.txt to prevent Google crawling the page. Whilst this may not stop it being indexed, it is unlikely it will be indexed (and even if it is, unlikely it will show for anything in SERPs other than perhaps the site: command) without any links pointing to such page. So I would not rely on Google not finding the page just because there are no links to it.

Likewise, if you do want page indexed, make sure there is a link to it or it exists in sitemap.xml, i.e. do not rely on orphan page being found on its own by Google.

<added>
I have seen the cases Google picking up the URL from comments in HTML, so it is not just whether the page has link pointing to it. Google can use all sort of things for 'discovery'.
</added>

[mcskoufis]

However, as I mentioned in the earlier post, there were some tests done in the past where the page A had a link to page B with link nofollowed and unique anchor text. In some tests the target page (B) did come up in search for that anchor text, in other tests it did not. Also, these tests were done some year(s) back so it may not be the same now.

aakk9999 there are some specific niches where Google would just be so foolish not to follow certain links, even if they are nofollowed.

Particularly in the USA and the UK with much larger keyword volumes than say in Greece, I've seen an example long-tail query with hundreds of monthly searches recently where the only links the top results had were not followed (not a commercial or competitive niche though).

Theres so many great lists of links that are nofollowed on the web due to what I think is a misunderstanding of the nofollow attribute and the general tons of garbage on the issue available in so called SEO so called "tutorials" and "professionals".

Maybe this is a discussion for the Link Building forum...

[EDIT:]clarified 2nd paragraph bit better[/edit]

[Oimachi2]

mcfoufis,

Now getting somewhere...Google is so vague in their explanations that testing is the only way to conclusively get answers.

However it's had because of the fact that Google might index and rank an orphan page WITHOUT and links on it....

So the test would have to be based on averages.

I might just conduct such a test although Google is such a mess with it's 500 algorithm changes a year that it might be a waste of time...

[mcskoufis]

@Oimachi2 testing is crucial in order to make an educated guess. However with so many updates on Google it is very hard to find evidence.

Sometimes a change you make or new action sometimes takes months to be recalculated by Google's algos, even on heavily linked corporate websites.

As Tedster used to say (not so long ago) you need to be very carefull not to confuse what is happening.