Google’s Take On NoFollow vs. DoFollow

I use nofollows on various sites of mine. The reason for using them is that some pages are really poor in terms of SEO, as we have designed them more for the user. We nofollow these pages and create a more SEO friendly page which is followed.

This seems to work fine for us and the nofollowed pages really don’t get indexed and the page rank is passed to the pages that we want it to go to.

I think you can over-do nofollowing stuff so as always, tread carefully.

Hi Arnie,

It’s been such a turbulent few weeks I have not had time to post here on your DoFollow Tuesday. What is in my comment today will give you the tip of the iceberg of what I am currently working on.

Let me make some quick, thought provoking and proven points here, all backed up by the new Google FriendRank, social profile algorithm.

Since Google wants to serve advertising behind walled gardens like Facebook and MySpace they have had to find a way in.

Next, they want to do the same thing on StumbleUpon and Delicious and they want to be able to circumvent their own monster they created, the nofollow attribute.

So, in the new (dubbed by Slashdot) FriendRank patent, they have a new algo. In the algo it states that as Google crawls a site, they “assign each link a weight” and that is a direct quote.

This allows them to bypass their own nofollow attribute. To cut to the chase here, Google has found reason and ways to bypass nofollow.

So it only goes to reason that Google can decide when and if to use their own nofollow guidelines.

Two more very interesting points and a little documentation to back up my claims.

#1 Google has been doing this for a while. Just go to StumbleUpon and look at your friends profiles with the Google toolbar in a browser. Why, if Stumble is nofollowed for the most part to keep social bookmarking spammers at bay, does Stumble profiles and groups have PR 5 and 6 rankings?

Next, why are some profiles in Ning groups carrying PR 2 and 3 when the group is behind a login?

Because Google chooses when to pay attention to nofollow and when they would prefer to bypass it. Why do profiles behind a login carry PR? Because Google has been allowed in and this has been going on for a long time. Since early in 2006 at least.

So, in conclusion, YES Google does selectively choose to pass on link juice and they have even written an algorithm to do so.

If you want my full indepth walk thru of the new FrinedRank algo, it is on my site.

best regards Arnie,
Chris Lang

I am still looking deeply into what Google is doing on social sites and many will say that StumbleUpon does not nofollow on in site links but nofollows outgoing links, just like Wikipedia. Thereby keeping all their link juice internal.

But think about this, if social bookmarking is affecting seach results then Google has to find a way to weed out the spam and value the good profiles that link to real content. That is what they are doing and I can pretty much prove it these days.

The best part is all my naysayers have now gone back into the woodwork where they came from and everyone is taking my content more seriously.

As far as Google looking past nofollow I think they have been writing sub algos that do this for them when the time is to their advantage and of their omnipotent Google choosing.

Maybe a good way to know is to put up a controlled experiment and test it correctly.

On the other hand, there are so many factors, that after the experiments, we look at the results, and have a hard time drawing the conclusions.

See all the discussion about if Google is counting only the first link to a domain, for instance.

I believe the great thing about no follow is that a) yes it may pass some link juice to the benefit of the recipient site but b) at the same time it absolves the linking site of any risk in placing the link.

So I can link from my real estate portal to individual real estate sites without having to worry about their individual SEO practices.

When I find a site I think thoroughly reputable I will give a do follow link as I believe this will benefit my site by linking to appropriate authority sites within that niche.

Google hates dead ends!

Just my opinions BTW.

I’m pretty new to SEO, so this was a very interesting blog to read.

I’ve found that using nofollow on sites helps limit the spam that can come in on comments. It appears that most spammers or people that aren’t really interested in adding relevancy to the internet believe that nofollow means what it says. Which has made me believe the same.

Now I guess I’ll need to do even more research and find out what is really happening.

To my knowledge and as a result of my link building I have noticed that links with nofollow still provide itself as a backlink but it does not pass and PR juice. I think it’s still valuable. A link is a link for me as long as it’s in a quality place and your not on a farm.

I am starting coming to come around on the whole nofollow argument. I believe Google does not follow “nofollow” links, but Yahoo! and MSN ignore the “nofollow” attribute. Of course I could be wrong!

I guess this is good to keep down some of the link spamming.

@Hatch - sorry but not going to help build links if you aren’t going to be totally honest. You didn’t build those blogs last night.

One of the first things any individual would like for his website is the speed of the site. Though people would like their sites to be running full steam, every time when someone clicks on their site,

Great article, and thanks for keeping your blog as dofollow!

I am new to SEO and have not noticed much difference to the quality of link juice from dofollow versus nofollow sites. Relevance and quality still rule. I love learning about SEO so I tend to respond to all blogs.

With a lot of years under my belt doing SEO, you would be remiss if you relied on just dofollow links and you think PageRank is the Holy Grail of SEO. Any SEO campaign should be well rounded including many methods. Nofollow links are for sure not irrelevant to a SEO campaign.

It can be true. Google maybe do follow for nofollow. It can be google spam scare tactics

Has anyone conducted some backlink building exercises on two websites? One with all no follow backlinks and one with all dofollow backlnks? I think this would be a great measuring stick!