NoFollows Dirty Little Secret

Posted on February 7, 2008 
Filed Under Search Engine Wars

Through a series of experiments conducted in the Web Genome research laboratories involving a 6 month period and lots of Unique IP’s and servers, we have discovered Googles dirty little No-Follow Secret.

To begin let us define the basis of No-Follow. This means that the web indexing robot will see the link, but not follow it nor index it.

The general purpose of No-Follow is a statement by a webmaster that they do not value the link enough to warrant giving that link credit in the SERPs (search engine results)

So to put it simply, the Link flow is like water, each link in promotes the page in the rankings and each link out decreases the rank. This means that in theory a webmaster wants as many links in and as little links out - hence the NOFOLLOW tag which is designed to allow the user to see and click on the link, but tells the search robot not to look at this link

Typically NO-follow is used by the following types of sites

What we are going to talk about is the 3rd subject. Affiliate Marketing pages. Typically online marketers will spend enormous time and resources to building up the Page Rank or link credibility of a web site for the express purpose of having this site rank high in the search engine results pages. They will then take the fruits of this high ranking and populate their page with just enough content to avoid getting G-Slapped and lots and lots of affiliate links to various merchants in their Niche.

The general idea is that hard core affiliate marketers will NOFOLLOW all of their affiliate links for the following reasons

We are going to talk about the 2nd point as it directly relates to our experiment. We have found that while the Google Crawler is not following and indexing anything marked with NOFOLLOW, it is however making a note of the link marked as NOFOLLOW and comparing it against its database to see if it already has that site or its redirects indexed.

It may recognize the site from its index, including the quality of the site, type of site and other sites that have linked into this site. By doing this, it sets a flag that can actually penalize your site for linking into a crappy page even if you use NOFOLLOW.

Because remember the ultimate goal of Google is to create the perfect search and they will use all tools within their reach in order to attain this goal

So what does this mean to you?

It means that NOFOLLOW, while not bleeding Page Rank (if such a thing really still exists) can be ignored by Google for the sake of its determining the general quality and type of site that you are offering. Affiliates beware.

Comments

One Response to “NoFollows Dirty Little Secret”

  1. rai on April 24th, 2008 5:10 pm

    nofollow blog great for backlink

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