21 replies to this topic

[Alan Perkins]

It's not a reliable test, OWG. There will be ways for Googlebot to find your nofollowed page, such as:

• ISP logs
• Rogue links within your own site or on third party sites
• Visits with the Google toolbar PR meter enabled

This is my real issue with what Matt said - he said "nofollow is one of the easiest ways to control crawling". Whether or not Googlebot follows nofollowed links, he should have said "nofollow is one of the worst ways to control crawling".

[nexenator]

The way I understand Matt's Quote(s) is exactly what everybody "was" thinking about that attribute. You just don't get any "linkjuice".

Imagine a new url never been spidered before. The first link that this url recieves is a "nofollow" link. Now Googlebot spiders the page where we've got the nofollow link from. The bot will send each regular link (not nofollowed) into its indexing queue but will not process any nofollow link(s). It's just as if the nofollow-link wasn't there. This in turn leads to a "no-crawl" of our new url.

Now if we recieve another, this time a regular link the new url will be crawled, pagerank will be assigned, etc, etc...

The Meta-Nofollow will just do the same with each and every link on the page containing the tag.

[MaKa]

A quick update of the results of my test. It's been a while, but how do you prove that something isn't going to happen? After this time I'm confident enough to draw some conclusions.

I started a small test linking to two pages one with a nofollow and the other without. Looking at the three main search engines, the link without the nofollow has repeatedly been accessed by Yahoo, MSN and Google robots. The link with the nofollow attribute has only been accessed by Yahoo.

My conclusion of this test: If the only link to a page is "nofollowed" Google and MSN do not index the page. Yahoo does.

[Scottie]

I still see no point in using it, personally...

[DanThies]

If I put nofollow on my links to a page, but some other fine individual decides to link to that page, Google will pick up that page from the other links and index it. As Alan said... it's not a reliable way to stop a page from getting indexed, nor should it be used in that way.

[Jill]

If I put nofollow on my links to a page, but some other fine individual decides to link to that page, Google will pick up that page from the other links and index it. As Alan said... it's not a reliable way to stop a page from getting indexed, nor should it be used in that way.

That's not what MC said...

[Alan Perkins]

He made no comment on its reliability, but I can tell you for a fact it's not reliable. Think of the consequences if the opposite were true: if one single nofollow link to a page could prevent that page from being indexed, chaos would follow...

Think of nofollow simply as a tool for channelling PageRank.