Google’s Matt Cutts Talks About Redirected Links & Nofollowed Links

Matt Cutts of Google has posted two short videos on the topic of links. One video answers how Google handles links that are 301 redirected and the other video answers how Google handles nofollowed links from authority sources.

Here is Matt’s video on 301 redirects where the question asked is does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects:

His answer, if you don’t want to watch it is. Typically yes, but Google deserves the right to pick which they pass. If all your links are through 301 redirects, then that looks suspicious.

Matt’s second video on nofollowed links answers two questions. The first, does Nofollow tag devalue the Google algorithms? The second, does Google take into account nofollowed links from authority sites, such as Wikipedia? Even thought it is nofollowed?

His answers, if you don’t want to watch the video are:

(Q) Does Nofollow tag devalue the Google algorithms? (A) Matt said the nofollow is used very rarely on the web, relative to all the links on the web. He said it is “miniscule” compared to all the links.

(Q) Does Google take into account nofollowed links from authority sites, such as Wikipedia? Even thought it is nofollowed? (A) Google doesn’t take into account the nofollowed Wikipedia links. But people may find your resource via Wikipedia and link to you without a nofollow from their site, so that might help you.

Matt did add that if a site has a lot of trust, like Wikipedia, does deserve the right to take the nofollow off. But it is up to the site to decide if they want to take off that nofollow tag. Matt goes as far to say that Google would support Wikipedia if they want to put into their policy a way of removing nofollow links from trusted editors and their content.

Plus, Peter Linsley from Google Image Search has a video up at the Google Webmaster Central blog with his presentation from SMX West on Google Images:

Postscript: Matt posted another video today, answering why Google has not yet built a ranking report in Webmaster Tools. The quick answer is that it is a resources thing. Google is constantly improving Webmaster Tools and adding features like the canonical tag element, which they think are more important then simple rank checking. Here is the video answer: