What does nofollow attribute really mean to search engines?
January 2, 2009 · Article by Sriraj · 1 Comment
Ok lets be clear in one thing.By using ‘nofollow’ attributes to certain links we tell the Search engines not to follow that link.
Right?
But does Search engines really follow your instructions?
Lets see what the four major search engines do hovering on a link:
nofollow
| nofollow | Yahoo | MSN/live | Ask.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Follows the link? | Yes | Yes | God knows | Yes |
| Follows the 'linked to' page? | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| In SERP's for anchor text? | Yes,but only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
Now got and idea what a ‘nofollow’ attribute does?
Google announced that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link target’s PageRank.
In fact Yahoo and MSN has also agreed on this point made by Google and respect this tag.
How the tag is interpreted varies from one search engine to another.Some search engines blindly follow the ‘nofollow’ instruction and keep away from the ‘linked to’ page while some others follow the link to get the new ‘linked to’ page indexed in their DB should it be not indexed before.
In the latter case the ‘nofollow’ tag just tells the searchbot to “not to credit the ‘linked to’ page” rather than ‘not to follow’.
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