As part of a project I am involved in at the moment I had the pleasure of spending a few of hours on a video chat yesterday (good old iChat) with some engineers from a couple of the large and well know search engines.
In relation to this project we were discussing indexing sites, and how the infamous NoFollow tag breaks the ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ mandate. But this may not necessarily be true. Does the NoFollow tag really break this?
When does the importance of links from an authority site break through the NoFollow barrier? If you are using NoFollow to stop comment spam then that is understandable, but should all outbound links be treated equal?
Is NoFollow perceived as an explicit instruction, or a suggestion? After all, this is just a backlink thing.
From the conversation I can say with certainty say that not all NoFollow tags are valued the same. Search engines still take note of new URL’s that they find (NoFollow or not) but are perceived as not ‘giving weight‘ to NoFollow tags. In reality, it is more a difference between bantam, light, middle, and heavy. And certain sites who are NoFollowing their links can still fit in the 200lb category whether they like it or not…
April 20th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
So are you saying… “that if the site has a high pagerank (or simialr weight with a search engine) the nofollow tags will be ignored” ??
April 20th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I would love to say that, but it is more on a site to site basis.
Dan
April 21st, 2008 at 7:34 am
I had sort of gathered something similar when I saw Michelle McPherson talking about some tests she had done on a misspelled search term that had zero pre-post hits, but then mysteriously popped up on the end of a no-follow tag.
Time to test using nonsense words I think