Is Google Crawling Through "nofollow" Links?

	Visited: 1692

	5.0/5.0 (4 votes total)
	Rate:

by Mark Barrera
December 08, 2006

Mark Barrera

Mark Barrera is director of Internet marketing at The MasterLink Group in Dallas, TX. Mark B is a Google Certified Advertising Professional and performs search engine optimization in Dallas.

Mark Barrera has written 3 articles for PromotionWorld.

View all articles by Mark Barrera...

I am not one to usually try to stir up debate or call the search engines out for misleading people, but I still can't figure out what a "nofollow" tag REALLY does. That being said, I know what it SUPPOSEDLY does, but there is data to contradict this claim. Now, that being said, it seems that Yahoo and MSN are obeying the rules, but Google, who was first to encourage the use of this tag is not doing what people think it is.

For those of you who do not know what the "nofollow" tag does, here is a quote from Search Engine Watch:

"If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

NOT follow through to that page.
NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for."

Now, I did a little experiment that anyone can do (some may call it blackhat - but to me it is just research), to test whether these beliefs of the nofollow tag actually were true in the 3 major search engines. What I did was go to the AskDaveTaylor.com blog and found an article to which I posted a comment. I chose this site due to its strong page rank and its level of trust in the search engines as seen by his many rankings - thanks Dave :-). The post that I left is under the name of "Mark Warranty Peterson," just a random name with a keyword in it and linked to the site "theautoclub.com". Now, since the comments are on this blog are treated with the rel="nofollow" tag, you would assume that none of the 3 rules of nofollow as outlined above would be disproven.

Ok, so here it is a few months later and the page that I left the post on has a PR5 and the SE algorithms have all had time to fully evaluate this page. So, I went in and did an exact search in Google, Yahoo and MSN for "Mark Warranty Peterson". Now, one would think that the only page that would show up in the results would be for the page in which the post was left. Well, the only search engine that lived up to this belief is the infamous Live Search. Yahoo's results showed the page of the post and one spammer page.

What did Google show? Hmm.....this is where I was VERY SURPRISED. The results show the page with the post on it, AND the page to which the nofollow link points!

Now, if I read correctly, according to a Google post, ''when Google sees the attribute (rel='nofollow') on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results." Well, I now have proof that this isn't true. I also, have the server logs to show that Google has crawled through this link to the destination website in the link with the nofollow. That disproves that Google will "NOT follow through to that page."

Now, I am pretty sure that I am not the only person that has done this test and sees the results. This must explain why I haven't seen a decline in comment spam on my blogs...

So, can somebody help me out and explain exactly how Google REALLY treats the nofollow tag?