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November 18, 2005

Yahoo! Following the NoFollow Tag?

Esoos reports on a HighRanking thread named Yahoo And Nofollow, They Follow?? The thread basically shows how Yahoo! is accounting for backlinks that are using the nofollow tag.

I am pretty sure that Yahoo! (Tim Mayer) said at a conference that if a nofollow tag is used, the spider will simply not recognize it. Folks in the forum tend to think that Tim meant they would not "trust" the link. But I am 99% sure they said they would not follow the link, as if it wasn't there.

So what is up? :)

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.



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posted rustybrick in Yahoo! Search Optimization at November 18, 2005 8:16 AM Comments (4)

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Comments

According to the specs and the intent of the whole rel=nofollow thingy, Yahoo handles it correctly. They follow the link to the spider food, but don't count the link as vote for the destination. So does Google, and MSN. 'nofollow' as value of the rel attribute does not mean that a spider has to ignore the link. Don't think of the rel attribute as a robots meta tag on the link level. (More info on rel=nofollow).

 

Posted by Sebastian at November 18, 2005 10:11

I'd like to add, that just because a link appears in backlink searches, linkdomain results, or the site explorer, that does not mean it passes reputation.

 

Posted by Sebastian at November 18, 2005 10:15

Sebastian,

Excellent comments. I must say that the webmaster guidelines on this subject tend to be pretty vague. Google says in multiple places that they won't "follow" or "crawl" these links, but in other places they just mention that they won't pass link pop.

Tricky. I agree that just because a link appears in backlink searches doesn't necessarily mean it passes link pop, but, then again, who's to say?

 

Posted by Esoos Bobnar at November 19, 2005 04:08

> who's to say?

The horse's mouth, and tests.

 

Posted by Sebastian at November 21, 2005 04:40

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