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Just recently I wrote a post Are Nofollow links Now Carrying Weight?. Well after running a couple of tests we have come to the conclusion that Google is now following No-Follow links. Let me give you the full breakdown.
Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was to find out if Google was following and indexing No-Follow links.
Hypothesis: From recent competitive analysis of other sites it seemed strange that some sites where ranking incredibly well even though these sites had a lot of their links coming in to them that contained the No-Follow attribute. This coupled with some recent comments made by Google lead me to believe that it could be entirely possible for Google to be following No-Follow links.
Summary (in detail): A few weeks ago I decided to run an experiment to find out if Google was indexing No-Follow links. In order to find this out I set up a separate sub-domain on Graphicseo.com. I decided to name this sub-domain final2.graphicseo.com (no follow added to this link to preserve quality). After creating this sub domain I then posted approximately 3 comment links on various blogs, making sure that these blogs were no-follow blogs.
Conclusion: After exactly 15 days my sub-domain is indexed by Google. I have made absolutely sure that these were the only 3 links going into this sub-domain and I did not submit this site to anything else. In other words, the only way Google could have found this domain were through the No-follow links.
(my page in Googles index)
It has been mentioned many times that Google does not follow, AT ALL, No-Follow links. Up until recently I would have believed this to be true.
What do you think about this? please feel free to leave a comment.
Update:For everyone saying that Google says that they still index No-Follow links here is Googles exact saying about No-Follow links:
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
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. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
And here is the link to the url where this is said:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
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Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business….
I think there’s a distinction between using nofollow links for discovery, and actually passing PagRank / anchor text with them. I think your test demonstrates them using it for discovery at least, ie to find out about previously unknown pages. Matt Cutts has denied this happens so good to see a test disproving that claim.
Whether it helps them rank is another thing entirely though. I dont think you can conclude anything on that issue from this test. But speculatively speaking I can definitely see the logic in Google seeing nofollow links that have a strong editorial weight behind them, eg longstanding wikipedia links, links in tweets that have been retweeted by a lot of influencers, links on social bookmarking sites that are nofollow by default but have gone beyond a certain editorial threshold, eg delicious homepage links. I would like to see some testing done to investigate this! But it’s hard to isolate all other factors when you are dealing with these kinds of links, because a large volume of ‘editorial’ nofollow links to a page will inevitably also be linked without nofollow.
Definitely a great point Jaamit. I will be running a follow up test on top of this one to see how much weight these links actually carry. This was just the first in a series of tests.
We’ve ran some tests here over the past year and have seen the indexing from nofollow links like you’ve displayed here. We’ve also seen our test site break the top 10 for its fairly tough keyword with 95% nofollow links…makes ya wonder
Yeah it really does. Not to start some conspiracy theory, but if you think about it, it would really be a strategic move for Google to follow No-Follow links
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Interesting test. I keep saying, who gives a crap what kind of link it is? It there is another link online that means there is yet another chance for your site to be seen. It’s better than if it weren’t there…
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, that’s my opinion.
- Chris
I agree with you 100% Chris. People have put to much weight into this whole No-Follow Do-Follow thing. Good internet marketers will put your link into as many locations as the possibly can. People focus to much on the manipulaiton of search engines and not enough on the power of raw traffic from other sites.
Rule number 1 of marketing: Do not count on only 1 form of traffic.
Agreed! If you are putting all your eggs on SEO, then one day they change their game, BOOM bye bye…
Your reputation and authority can only get destroyed by things YOU DO, something you have control over. Referal traffic is the best kind of traffic. Look at Facebook or even Mashable. It’s marketed through word of mouth. Facebook is nowhere on Google for the most part (sometimes) yet is one of the most visited sites online =)
I couldn’t have said it better myself. You have just won me over as a subscriber to your blog. I will definitely be checking it regularly.
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Awesome – I had a feeling that nofollow was BS ..
question, did you put a robots.txt on that subdomain telling Google not to index it?
The reason I say that is because in a recent YT vid by Matt Cutts, he was talking about how the robots.txt file works. Some people were saying Google was indexing pages that were set not to be indexed by robots.txt.
Matt said that Google respects the robots.txt, so it doesn’t go to the page that you block, and doesn’t pull the HTML from it — BUT if there are inbound links with anchor text describing the page, and if the page is in the DMOZ, then it could still show up in Googles index.
So I wonder.. run the same test, different subdomain, with robots.txt to block everything in that subdomain…? Thoughts?
Good stuff my friend
I will run a test on that before this month is out and inform you of the progress. That is a definitely a valid point.
Thanks for the idea and thanks for commenting
Being indexed and being ranked are not the same thing. Great you are indexed. That doesn’t mean that Google is ranking your site. Google has ALWAYS “followed” links with the nofollow attribute, they have just chosen not to rank sites according to these links. This may or may not change in the future.
You are right. We haven’t performed any test as far as ranking is concerned. I will however start a test within the next week to see if renking is influenced, at all by no-follow links.
Thanks for the comment
I had a feeling no follow wasn’t real either. I had gotten a no follow link from a very high pr site, 9 and the next day my google search went up 30%, and hasn’t dropped. I didn’t think it was a coincidence.
Awesome, looks like you ran into a lot of luck with that one. PR9 is an awesome link to obtain, they are very rare. BTW I like the content on your site, but do you mind if I give you a pointer? My pointer is, it would help to change up the look a tad bit to make it a little more 2.0′ish. A very good theme for you would be:
http://www.themesjunction.com/templates/food-1.html
just pick one of them themes out. Also please do not take offense to what I am saying. Your blog does look nice, and the content on it is spectacular. As a web designer I just feel that you should really push to take it to the next level.
I always wondered about this. Sometimes it’s discouraging seeing all these nofollow blogs. I’ve always ignored it and posted comments anyways. What can it hurt really.
As you can see in this post, it won’t hurt you at all. Even if Google was respecting the no-follow 100% it is still a good link to obtain because it weighs out your do-follow links.
So why do you use “nofollow” in your comments if you found out, that Google follows “nofollow”-links ?
For 2 very good reasons:
1) I am lazy and never clicked it off.
2) I don’t wanna wake up tomorrow morning and have 1,000 spam comments in my pending que.
You see spammers specifically look for blogs with do-follow and then try to spam the crap out of them. While a lot of bloggers put up with this because it brings more people to their blog, I really don’t have the time to sift through who is real and who is SPAM.
I think you could be right there, however it is possible that when creating the subdomain it was pinged to google. Check to make sure your host does not do this.
Also alexa has a way of finding subdomains on sites in there index and indexing them. It is possible if the main site was added in alexa then alexa took your subdomain to add in there search, then google indexed the subdomain off alexa.. This is a long way round, but it is possible.. The reason i say is because i have seen a similar situation.
Regards
Google doesn’t say nor have they hever said, they do NOT follow “Nofollow” links.
The result of your test has been going on since day one, the spiders do follow all links, and index them.
The “Nofollow” tag simply tells Google not to pass on any link juice to it. People see “Nofollow” and assume that will tell Google will not to index it, but none of the search engines work like that.
Nofollow is only to prevent passing on link juice, not to prevent a site from getting indexed.
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[...] anything. This has been debated by Joseph Alvini who experienced with a sub domain page whether it got ranked or not only using the no-follow tag. The results were contradicting the argument of the Google support centre since the site got [...]
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Could you please do a test on whether or not nofollow links help boost SERP? I have seen many sites rank #1 or #2 on Google for competitive phrases with entire backlink profile filled with PR 0 nofollow links. Even the dofollow links were either N/A or 0 PR. I am talking about the keywords like "cheap ugg boots" "cheap rolex watches" etc… the usual spam keywords
-Kai