Does Google ignore nofollow?

[deezin]

Hi. I just published a book so I thought I would put a picture of the book and a link on every one of my pages. I put rel="nofollow"It seems to me that Google ignores rel="nofollow" on the links. Then I noticed that we dropped down in ranking. So I made a page for my book, and linked to that page from every page of my site. And the ranking is still bad. This happened 6 months ago too, when I published a game and I wanted to let my website traffic know about it. So, my question is, does google really even take nofollow into consideration. We, as web owners, should be allowed to tell our viewers about new things we are doing without getting penalized. Its crazy. Please advise. Thank you!

Rachel

[graeme_p]

It could just be a coincidence - the ranking change could be due to something else, including an algorithm change, something else you did, something competitors did....

What Google actually say about nofollow is:

"In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links."

[support.google.com...]

That is not a statement that they completely ignore nofollow links. It sounds more as though there is an algorithm that decides how to treat a link that usually does not transfer page rank through nofollow links.

[deezin]

Thank you. Maybe I will take it down, but it doesn't seem fair. Google drives me nuts some times. Thank you for your response!

[Storiale]

My memory is that they claimed within the past year that nofollow does carry weight, just not as much as a regular follow link, however I have good news: I'll be updating this with real-world info on the changing of 1,700,000 backlinks that should be nofollow but are not. We are methodically changing these links to add "nofollow" on the footer of 9 websites that we own. They should have been nofollow in the first place.

I believe it is why we are not beating our competition when we should be. We have already overwritten 500,000 links on March 1, 2016. So far, no negative effects. I just put a ticket in for another 700,000 links to have nofollow. By the end of the month they should all be done. These links represent 50% of all backlinks to our main site.

We are taking this in decent chunks and constantly measuring to be sure we don't make a major mistake as the clock is ticking for the next Penguin update. I will definitely keep this updated if you folks don't mind.

[JS_Harris]

My answer: Yes, absolutely, no doubt whatsoever. If I dig in my analytics I can even come up with a date for when it happened, I remember affiliate sites getting hammered and the affiliate program sites they were linking to skyrocketed for a short time.

How it worked was that if Google trusted a site then they ignored you suggesting it wasn't trustworthy(ie:ignored nofollow). Matt Cutts asked in a video what webmasters would think if Google only selectively listened to nofollow links. He pointed out that there really is never a good reason to nofollow internal links, for example. The response was negative, he said no more about it and a few months later the net changed as if it happened. This is several years ago now.