How Search Engines Handle The Nofollow Attribute

Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has a nice write up on how the search engines handle the nofollow attribute now just over two years since it was introduced. Ask.com still does not follow the tag, so here are the takeaway for Google and Yahoo: Google won’t follow the link, Yahoo will (note) Google and […]

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Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has a nice write up on how the search engines handle the nofollow attribute now just over two years since it was introduced.

Ask.com still does not follow the tag, so here are the takeaway for Google and Yahoo:

  • Google won’t follow the link, Yahoo will (note)
  • Google and Yahoo won’t pass link popularity for that specific link
  • Google would hope that Wikipedia would not take such an “absolute approach” on the nofollow link attribute being applied so widely.


Note From Danny:
Google WILL follow nofollow links in the sense that if someone else links to a page without using nofollow, then Google might find the page that way. Nofollow on one link to a page doesn’t somehow cause ALL links to be off limits.


In addition, if a new site goes up, even if no one links to it at all, Google in particular is known to crawl anyway when it sees a domain registration happen.

In short, if you put something up on the web without a password-protection barrier, there’s a chance a search engine will find it, nofollow or no nofollow. Nofollow is not designed to be a spider blocking system.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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