Googlebot ignoring the rel=nofollow attribute
This discovery is likely going to throw spanner to the works for many SEO’s out there. I have evidence to show that Googlebot does not abide by its own rules.
Google Webmaster Tools: Pages that link to yours report identified a couple of links which caught my attention:
If you were to visit these 2 pages, you’d see my comments somewhere on them.
I know that those links have the rel=nofollow attribute embedded. And its not that I’m complaining for the link credits, but I wonder what Matt Cutts meant meant when he said, “..for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph..“.
It could be that this report is only reporting to you what Googlebot has found to link to your site, and that does not necessarily mean that any credit (link juice) has been given from them. If that is the case, then you’d be better informed than to take it as a listing of all “Google-endorsed” links to your site, because they’re not.
Vanessa Fox had previously mentioned that this reporting tool shows you all of backlinks from Google’s main index from the video interview below:
One thing is for sure, this only throws up more questions than answers to anyone who gets to read this posting.
From Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-provides-backlink-tool-for-site-owners/
“Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight”
Comment by JLH — September 28, 2007 @ 6:14 pm
JLH, thanks for dropping by and passing off your comments.
Having said that, I think you missed the point I was trying to make. Its not so much about the “weight” issue as it is about Googlebot following those nofollow links.
The assumption many SEOs would be making is that, while nofollow is a useful tool in diverting link juice to the appropriate links, we have also been told that Googlebot will not follow those links. If that is the case, then the assumption that it should also not appear in the backlinks report should hold too.
I suppose the question we should be asking is that why bother capturing the link when the instruction is to ignore it?
Comment by azam — September 28, 2007 @ 6:27 pm
It’s pretty easy to test. Create a page. Link to it with nofollow and watch the logs. Googlebot will not crawl the target page (without another link pointing to it), yet Yahoo will. At least the last time I checked.
The real point is that the statistics shown in webmasters tools are pretty much worthless, or at least unrealiable.
Comment by JLH — September 28, 2007 @ 7:02 pm