Tuesday March 06, 2007
Is NoFollow Misnamed or Not?
Conventional wisdom is that the rel="nofollow" mechanism is misnamed. As the current version of the NoFollow Wikipedia article says:
rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document."
But... Recently Matt Cutts (a Google specialist in SEO issues) has contradicted that. Specifically, a forum participant asked:
...does nofollow really prevent Google from crawling a page?And Matt responded:
...if a page would have been found anyway via other links, it doesn't prevent crawling of that page. But I believe that if the only link to a page is a nofollow link, Google won't follow that link to the destination page.
So he's saying that rel="nofollow" really does mean "don't follow" (at least to Google), and that the conventional wisdom (and Wikipedia article) are wrong?
Is that right? It'd be nice to have a definitive answer, given the "I believe" opening in Matt's statement.
Tags: google microformats nofollow pagerank search wikipedia
Posted at 09:52AM Mar 06, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0 | Comments[6]
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