Does No-Follow still pass some value ?

[Sebastian]

Hey,

This is just speculation obviously, but do some of you have reason to believe that No-Follow links still pas some value, maybe trust related?

I ask because one my sites has been referenced four times in Wikipedia, and ranks extremely well although it doesn't have many other links.

Most of my other sites have 10x, 20x this amount of links, but don't rank nearly as well. Again, this clearly doesn't suffice as proof but I thought I'd ask to see what PAL members thought about this subject.

Thoughts ?

Sebastian

[chaumi]

I've yet to see any hard evidence (anywhere) that you don't receive credit for no follow links in...but have seen suggestions that if you no follow links out you may encounter some form of penalty/reduction in 'power' of your page

[Sebastian]

If I understand what you're saying, you mean having no-follow outbound links on your page reduces its power somehow ?

I'm not sure I agree with that. However, having no-follow links on outbound links will dissipate Page Rank. In the past it used to block PR and redistribute it to other links, but now it just dissipates it.

I remember seeing a video from Matt Cutts saying that you would not be "penalized" for using no-follow excessively. So I don't think there's a risk as you state.

[Michael Martinez]

The search engines don't tell us which links are passing value in their indexes. There is still a hard core though small group of people in the SEO community who argue that at least some nofollowed links are being trusted.

However, without a reliable test for determining whether a link passes value in a search index, we cannot know for sure whether nofollow works differently in a few places.

However, being mentioned in Wikipedia might get you some unnofollowed links on Wikiclones, and that could be the source of any benefit you're seeing.

[dietcola]

well from my research - we found that google still goes down the link -

i think the no follow attribute comes into pagerank sculpting and link architecture as such - so if you want to absorb pr on a deeppage/ domain etc - if you were to basically no follow the out bounds then the pr would be absorbed by the domain n not leaked to the sites beyond...

so yea - i found they still go down em - but yea its used alot fomr social media sites because of the high volume of links going out - so say if google was to hit twitter n go down all the spam links outa there or in facebook etc - those models dont fit the referring authority site aka pagerank algo google uses - but they will be incorporating nofollow into natural link mixes i bet..

ps u should use the no follow tag on things like - logins and where you need to imput data - no need to send google to a log page etc... personal details etc

rant

[Mark]

I have no evidence at all, but my hypothesis is that a no-followed link on a site can help you in regards to SEO. I think search engines are getting better at determining which links are more natural and ones that are obviously there for ranking reasons (i.e. blog comment links).

I also think that even if your URL is mentioned on another site without being hyperlinked, that will help you in regards to SEO. I have no proof of this but I seriously think that this will come into play, if not now, then eventually.

Mark

[dietcola]

I

I also think that even if your URL is mentioned on another site without being hyperlinked, that will help you in regards to SEO. I have no proof of this but I seriously think that this will come into play, if not now, then eventually.

Mark

naturally! no pun intended

[PTC]

I see much value here although I know that this skirts your question a little bit. If someone wants to dissect your backlink profile these will make it tougher and waste their time. They can also bring targeted traffic and help your pages get crawled more often by the search engines. If there is speculation (there is) that CTR and other factors of this nature can affect your performance in the SERPS, this might in someway be affected by links even if they are nofollowed. By this I mean that even if there is zero pagerank passed, google will still know who is using the links, and they might know if that link is actually useful or not.

Not to mention... nofollowed links will not always be nofollowed by a particular site. Nofollowed links will probably not always be treated the same by google in the future. All this being said... do they pass pagerank value? I don't really care. I see enough value in some of these links regardless of pagerank issues. I have gotten some of my most powerful backlinks from networking and commenting on people's blogs - the comment links are not that valuable, but the networking aspect is very valuable.

[nickjett]

I think the nofollow attribute passes value only on ASK.com

[Michael Martinez]

No one has, to my knowledge, published any actual proof that Google is consistently following nofollowed links. A number of oddities have been brought to light. In fact, last month Matt Cutts said they were working to close the gap where if you embedded "rel='follow'" in a comment link that would normally have "rel='nofollow'" appended to the end of the A tag, the "nofollow" was ignored.

I have not attempted to test whether that gap has been closed yet.