Google and NoFollow Links
According to both Google and Matt Cutts from Google, if there is a NoFollow in a link, Google will simply ignore that link. So the following page won’t get indexed through that link. This way you can legitimize your link buying for sake of traffic not for sake of tricking Google with their ranking. There are also other reason you may use NoFollow on your links.
Some SEO experts suggest that the crawler indeed follows the link but does not transfer any rank to it and I have also have had my doubts so I ran a little test to see how this actually work. I had a site that I had not submitted to Google so I sent a NoFollow link to it from one of my high ranking websites and sure enough after about a few weeks my site was listed in Google.
Now this test does not necessarily mean that my site was added through the NoFollow. As far as I know, someone else could have added it to Google (no idea why, the site didn’t have any good info on it). However this little expermint raised my doubts even more on NoFollow to the point that I want to believe that despite what Mr. Cutts and Google are saying, there is possibility that the crawler actually does follow the NoFollow links but it does not count them toward ranking the destination page.
However I could be wrong so I need to do more research, reading, and experiments on NoFollow links. But for now this is what I know and have experiance. Feel free to share your experience and comments on this issue I would love to read them.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Very interesting finding…I am also puzzled about the whole nofollow thing.
I have read that Google follows the nofollow links but does not simply rank them.