Are Nofollow Links Really No Follow?

Supposedly, search engines ignore nofollow links. But do they really?

A couple months ago, Shard did a test to determine how Google treats nofollow links. The results of the test were interesting, but not quite 100% conclusive, since the search term used was a mis-spelling, which Google recognized and highlighted results for the correctly spelled word. (The test was done using “piderman 3″ which Google correctly recognized to be a misspelling of “Spiderman 3″. Google then displayed and highlighted results for Spiderman 3 in the searchresults.)

Plus, another test was done which indicated that only Yahoo and Ask pay attention to nofollow links. This test only measured the indexing power of nofollow links, though, not the ranking power. (Interestingly enough, I found a nofollow link that was returned using the Yahoo link: command the other day…)

My Test

So, I’ve decided to do our own test to add more data to the nofollow debate. I’m currently running a test to determine:

• Do Google/Yahoo/MSN follow and index pages from nofollow links?
• Do Google/Yahoo/MSN rank pages based on the anchor text of nofollow links?

Here’s How The Test Will Work:

I’ve chosen a keyword that returns no results on Yahoo, Google, and MSN. I’ve written a page on one of my sites that is not linked to, and does not include the keyword or any similar word. I’ve then linked to the page from several other sites using nofollow links.

Now we just have to wait and see what happens. When the results come in, I will post them here, so be sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!