Is Google Crawling Through "nofollow" Links? |  | Visited: 1494 |
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| 5.0/5.0 (4 votes total) |
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| | by Mark Barrera
December 08, 2006 |
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?
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