Valentin Agachi

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Does rel=nofollow work?

It's been almost an year now, since the search community introduced the rel="nofollow" attribute. It was a ground breaking technique for spammers and not only, but the question is does it still work?

Google started the trend when they announced the new attribute. Along with them hoped onboard also Yahoo and MSN and a lot of other blog-related sites. The original idea was to stop the comment spam on blogs. Well, it had an impact, but not the one desired, because spam still exists even with the nofollow-ed links.

Another use that a lot of the SEO world saw, was controlling the outbound links on a page, by adding rel="nofollow" to the links you want not to hand over a part of your page rank. And another way of using nofollow, which I myself used a few times, is to give nofollow to a link which performs an operation which has an effect on the user's browsing session, but would not affect the search engines' bots. I know that theoretically this shouldn't be done by GET methods, as the HTTP RFC specifies. It is said that for actions the POST method should be used. But sometimes, just sometimes it looks better with a link than a button to submit a form.

One day a few months ago I wanted to see which search engines obey to this rule, and which don't, which follow links which are given rel="follow" and which don't. I put a special file on my site fur testing purposes only, which I marked it with nofollow. A couple of months later here we are, and I have an interesting piece of data I want to share.

MonthCrawlerTimes accessed
Dec 2005Yahoo 1
Dec 2005Java 1.5.05
Dec 2005Java 1.4.21
Dec 2005Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/5.201
Dec 2005Crawler 2
Dec 2005Java 1.4.12
Dec 2005Larbin 1
Dec 2005Robot 1
Jan 2006Java 1.5.08
Jan 2006Java 1.4.26
Jan 2006Look 1
Jan 2006Crawler 2
Jan 2006Larbin 2
Jan 2006Yahoo 1
Jan 2006GoogleBot 2.19
Jan 2006Java 1.4.16
Jan 2006Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/5.85a1
Jan 2006Robot geniebot1
Jan 2006PsBot 1
Feb 2006Java 1.5.03
Feb 2006Java 1.4.13
Feb 2006Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/5.961
Feb 2006Java 1.4.21
Feb 2006Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/6.13c1
Feb 2006GoogleBot 2.12

So when we add them up, in a three months interval, the page was crawled as such:

CrawlerTimes accessed
Java 1.5.016
GoogleBot 2.111
Java 1.4.111
Java 1.4.28
Crawler 4
Larbin 3
Yahoo 2
Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/5.201
Robot 1
Look 1
Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/5.85a1
Robot geniebot1
PsBot 1
Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/5.961
Robot OmniExplorer_Bot/6.13c1

It seems that Google alone did the most crawling, from those which seem to be a search engine crawler. So what does this mean? Are the search engines not respecting their own imposed crawling filter?

Comments

at 19:09 on 19/Feb/2006

Tibi

Comment by Tibi

That's very weird, Valentin. By the way, I really like your blog.

at 13:42 on 10/May/2006

goggle

Comment by goggle

Had been doing research on the same and found the same too

at 21:51 on 25/May/2006

tim boucher

Comment by tim boucher

Yeah, I've been wondering this as well. It certainly seems that spammers have been hardly affected by the rel="nofollow" thing, or at least that what it seems based on the spam I get on my site. If anything though, it's forced them to up the ante with their techniques. More importantly though, if search engines aren't even really following this method, or if they're simply giving "nofollow" links a lower rating, then the whole thing is pretty stupid!

at 19:52 on 05/Jun/2006

tom sherman

Comment by tom sherman

Valentin:

Are you 100% sure that the site pointed to by the "nofollow" link could not have been indexed or found in another way?

I ask because Danny Sullivan is curious. ;) (No, really -- see my trackbacked post above.

at 20:19 on 05/Jun/2006

Valentin A.

Comment by Valentin A.

@tom: I am pretty sure, because that URL was only accessed by entities with the User Agent from the table above and exactly that many times.

at 15:04 on 14/Aug/2006

Alexander B.

Comment by Alexander B.

Well, I think you missed the idea a little bit: crawling ("hitting") on link is not mentioned to be prohibited by nofollow. Nofollow items will never appear in SERPs, they will never be included into PR counting and they will not be taken into consideration as backlinks. That's the idea.

at 00:12 on 15/Mar/2007

salon

Comment by salon

Like the blog. sorry im late to the discussion. I find it very interesting that google may be crawling these links.

at 19:15 on 02/Jun/2007

Java Donkey

Comment by Java Donkey

Alexander has the right idea but who's to say what the Search Engines do with the links after they crawl them... would be interesting to see if that page ever got page rank in google..

at 04:54 on 28/Dec/2007

weisbrod

Comment by weisbrod

anybody have similar results with off-site links and the rel=nofollow attribute?

at 08:36 on 22/Oct/2008

RSA course

Comment by RSA course

I note that the links for the comments on this blog are nofollow. I just installed a handy little bit of code into Firefox that puts nofollow links in red. This saves heaps of time trying to view-source.

I don't believe it makes any difference to rankings at the moment. Most blogs by default are nofollow for comments, but blog comments still seem to pass on link-weight.

A Stumble for your efforts :)

at 06:57 on 22/Jan/2009

Roller Blinds

Comment by Roller Blinds

I did an experiment with a new blog with a new domain and just used nofollow links as backlinks. It ranked pretty quickly and well for a moderately difficult search term.

I suspect over time the search engines will use it more once they clean they spam from their datasets, but at the moment I don't believe it makes any difference.

at 16:55 on 05/Aug/2009

Unibands

Comment by Unibands

Google and others crawl the link but DO NOT give weight to the resource or index it publicly.

at 06:41 on 13/Nov/2009

truck rental

Comment by truck rental

my own trials would indicate that nofollow links can still be effective in building page rank.

at 13:53 on 09/Dec/2009

Alex

Comment by Alex

I'd also echo the comment about how it doesn't seem to effect the ranking, or at the very least, indexing.

One of my sites has mostly nofollow backlinks, but has picked up some PR juice from them. At least I'm assuming it's from them.

Interesting read anyway, and I'm sure we will never really know for sure.

Alex

at 07:52 on 10/Dec/2009

aboange

Comment by aboange

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at 07:57 on 10/Dec/2009

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Comment by page rank

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at 02:56 on 05/Feb/2010

Costume Host

Comment by Costume Host

Some people say that "nofollow" actually does improve pagerank but not as much compared if there was no "nofollow" tag.

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at 16:27 on 07/Mar/2010

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at 00:57 on 11/Mar/2010
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You are reading a post entitled "Does rel=nofollow work?".

It was posted on 10 February 2006 and tagged with Blogs, Bugs, HTML, Search engines.

Technorati tags: Blogs Bugs HTML Search engines

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