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25th
May
2007
 Someone sent me a link to this post, and I found it extremely interesting. According to the article, Google is following and factoring “no followed” links for ranking purposes. Back in November, “no follow” was given the white stamp of approval by Matt Cutts, and I heard him say with my own ears that Google will not follow them, or assign any Page Rank either. The someone (braver than me) asked “What if you’re just trying to funnel your own Page Pank?” and Matt replied that it was fine. I wish I could quote him, but his basic response was that they don’t care, and it’s not considered “evil”. Well, I have a nofollowed link to this same person that shared the article with me, and it’s been no followed since December. Around February, we noticed that he finally stopped being counted in his inbound link count. After reading that post today, he noticed that Google was again counting my “no followed link in his link:site.com. I know that this isolated incident is hardly conclusive evidence that Google is following no follows, but facts are facts. Google links are being followed and counted again, that’s worth knowing… By the way, here’s the guy who sent me the story ( no followed of course) |
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Copyright 2007; Search Commander; SEO Consultant Scott Hendison; All Rights Reserved.
May 25th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Hi Scott
I thought I was losing my mind. Thanks for your post!
I agree with you. Further, I see your backlink in Webmaster Tools as Link #58 for me.
I did an experiment where I took a PR6 site, and attempted to ‘funnel’ its PR by nofollowing the CONTACT US page, etc.
The site went down to a PR5 on the last update (obviously cannot conclusively draw conclusions due to latent variables) but I no longer believe that NOFOLLOW is (or ever was) to be used as neither a PR Concentrator, or an SEO tool.
May 26th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
This looks more like the exception rather than the rule, because the majority of no followed links that I’ve checked are still not showing up with the site:domain.com search in Google.
As far as whether or not you believe it or not, take a look at this old post of Danny Sullivan’s here
However, after pointing out the apparent open door to “page rank funneling” he then says this…
So… there ya go. This is conclusive proof that, uh… well… I don’t really know, but it’s sort of interesting!