Forum Moderators: martinibuster
They appear in Google's webmaster tools link section. Just made me question it.
Each nofollow link on a page makes the remaining clean links carry more link juice to their destination, which helps. Some nofollow pages tend to be off-topic to the theme of the site, e.g. Terms & Conditions, Contact Us, Disclaimer, Privacy etc.
Forums also use other means, e.g. robots.txt, to block some dupe content, or they could use nofollow.
But , just to clarify , what i meant was, is the link/s with a rel="nofollow" from a popular Q&A section on say Yahoo answers going to provide any benefit to the target page ?
[edited by: Whitey at 3:30 am (utc) on Mar. 1, 2009]
See also:
[webmasterworld.com...] - A bit long but really worthwhile
[webmasterworld.com...] - Techniques and ethics
[webmasterworld.com...] - Potential limitation
I'm going to persist a little further ... Since Google records these "no follow" links [ as shown in WMT ] what value to the recipient site might there be in the algo ?
Value by some sort of association maybe in the overall credibilty of the recipient site ?
* If this is added to a link pointing towards your website, you will not benefit at all from a PR value; simply because this piece of code tells the search engines crawlers not to follow or index or relate this page to the one the link is currently placed on.
* If you use it on your own website to "remove" access to unrelated pages such as contact, policies, etc... you will benefit from it as there will be less non-relevant page on your site and each indexed page will carry a higher PR weight.
* Finally, remember that the main purpose of SEO is to generate targeted traffic, not high PR alone. Even with a rel="nofollow" if the link is well located, it will generate targeted traffic for your site, which in the end is really what you are looking for!
Good luck!
Nicolas Prudhon
1. Even if Google doesn't count them, some other search engines might.
2. Google could change its policy and count them in the future.
3. In some cases, Google Webmaster Tools list of anchor texts includes phrases from nofollow links, another indication that they aren't totally disregarded. Question: If Google doesn't use this information, then why does it collect it?
4. Having some nofollow links to your site will make its overall link profile look more natural, which is good.
Moreover, it will not give any credit in terms of page rank to the linked site. You can safely assume that crawler will ignore the link if there is rel="nofollow" attribute associated.
I'm going to persist a little further ... Since Google records these "no follow" links [ as shown in WMT ] what value to the recipient site might there be in the algo ?
i am guessing that google is just trying to give you an accurate count of all the links pointing back to your site. you may miss some through your analytic suite if traffic is not driven through them.
i am sure you can find something to do with that information; such as leverage those links to evangelize your site when you want to get more links in the future.
[mattcutts.com...]
Some interesting & expansive comments here with regards to Wiki type links [ ie potential authority sites ] and the proportion of sites with nofollows.
Is it OK to put a nofollow on the outbounds in the 'summary of links' box or might this might pass conflicting messages to Google? Some advice would be appreciated.
Thanks
Is it OK to put a nofollow on the outbounds in the 'summary of links' box or might this might pass conflicting messages to Google? Some advice would be appreciated.
That basically depends on if you believe that PR is passed from more than one link [to the same destination] on a page or not. That's a whole other debate. If I were going to nofollow them I'd put it on both links on the page.
But if you want to be a nice webmaster I'd not nofollow any of the links, especially since it sounds like you're pointing them out as being useful resources.
