How Does Google Handle The NoFollow Attribute?

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February 15, 2007

How Does Google Handle The NoFollow Attribute?

I spotted a good Google Groups thread that has Google's official word on how they handle the nofollow attribute in links.

When Google began complying with the nofollow attribute, they posted this blog entry but people are still fuzzy today on how they handle it exactly.

Adam Lasnik of Google replied to this question:

Does Google crawl a rel="NOFOLLOW" tagged link and not give it credit, or does it just stop at the link and not visit that page unless it's found elsewhere?

Adam said the "latter" so, Google will not even let the spider crawl links that have the nofollow attribute. But it will crawl the link if it is found elsewhere.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at February 15, 2007 8:18 AM Comments (7)

Comments

One really wonders if that is true - many Webmasters have claimed that they were able to get their BRAND NEW SITES spidered bot and cached on Google Yahoo and MSN by submitting the links to forums and blogs that used the NOFOLLOW - even when they did not submit it any place else.

Also, sometimes, the backlinks are credited in Google from sites with NOFOLLOW backlinks

Posted by SearcH EngineS WeB at February 15, 2007 09:14

There is no need to wonder if the claim is true. The major search engines all send their spiders to new domains regardless of whether those domains have any inbound links.

Posted by Michael Martinez at February 15, 2007 10:33

So, say you had a banned site link on your site....if you had no follow, does this make google blind to the fact?

Posted by BoSolaris at February 16, 2007 08:47

Hi,

The 'no-follow' tag has definitely created some angry blog posts this week.

The best I think is 13 reasons why nofollow tags suck on search engine journal's blog.

Yahoo at least looks like it ignores 'no-follow' tags anyway.

Ta-Ta

Posted by Traffic Slurp at February 16, 2007 09:01

It may not give the links credit in terms of score, but they show up as inbound links in your Webmaster tools, so they must at least recognize them.

Posted by Justin Seibert at February 16, 2007 13:26

I want to know if "nofollow" passes anything at all as far as PR goes.