Out of the Woodwork

« World's Oldest Blogg... | Main | Google Maps Super-Zo... »

http://blogs.sun.com/woodjr/date/20070306 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:

Posted at 09:52AM Mar 06, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[6]

Comments:

Hi, Google provide complete guideline how index web pages.. remove web page.. and so... than why we need any other suggestion

Posted by Gymso on March 07, 2007 at 09:28 AM MST #

Thanks for the comment, Gymso. How can we consider Google's guidelines to be complete when they don't have a definitive statement about exactly how they use NoFollow?

Posted by Jamey Wood on March 07, 2007 at 09:37 AM MST #

I agree about Google's guidelines. Sometimes getting a real answer from Google is like getting the Sphinx to spill it's secrets. It would be useful to know exactly what nofollow means to them...

Posted by Ray Dotson on March 08, 2007 at 04:51 AM MST #

It means "pass no reputation" to Google. Recently they've changed the behavior of discovery crawling in a way that when the only link to a page Google knows of is nofollow'ed, Googlebot most probably will not crawl it right away. That's just a side effect -- not reliable because all other engines handle it differently -- and not a redefinition of the rel-nofollow microformat.

Posted by Sebastian on April 04, 2007 at 07:02 AM MDT #

yeah… those stupid wiki’s! wonder what happen if we all use nofollow to them? Have a good one.

Posted by SEO on July 22, 2007 at 02:21 AM MDT #

The official claim is that links with the rel= nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel= nofollow attribute.

i think nofollow helps indexing

Posted by john illnes on April 10, 2008 at 03:10 AM MDT #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed

This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.