For a long time people went crazy trying to build links everywhere in an attempt to get a better ranking on the search engines. Then Google invented the nofollow attribute for a hyperlink. This attribute was a direction order to the Googlebot (and now used by other spiders) to tell them not to follow a link and index it.
This meant that webmasters could “nofollow” their external links and preserve page rank value for their sites - and also cut out a lot of link spamming in comments etc. If the links are not valuable (because they are nofollowed) then the incentive to build them is gone.
However – I have a theory. My theory is that secretly Google does place a value on ALL links, including nofollow links. So here is a test to see if this is true. We are going to create a link to a website using some very strange anchor text which is found on no other page on the internet. Then we will get this page indexed and see if a search for that exact anchor text brings up 1 or 2 pages. If it only brings up 1 page (this blog post) then the nofollow aspect is legitimate. If it brings up two pages – it is bringing up the page that is being linked to also. In the second scenario it would demonstrate that nofollow links DO have some value.
So the anchor text we will use is: (one really long strange word!!)
yyyyyyyyyyy-not-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz-february-porcupine
The anchor text links to www dot freelance dash web dash designer dot com dot au. You can click the below Google Search link and see what the result are of this search. Initially until this page is indexed the search will bring no result. After this page is indexed it will either bring 1 or 2 results, and either prove or disprove my theory.
UPDATE 19 FEB 2011 It took a week to get the results, but it seems that Google really doesn't follow the no follow links. The anchor text didn't result in a search for the linked to page, and so proves that Google didn't follow the link.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
