Link Building

[vangogh]

Technically they shouldn't be following the link, but I've seen how they do. Still indexing and ranking are two completely different things. Google will still find your site if it's linked in your forum signature.

You'd probably get more traffic from the Wikipedia, but again it's not likely any link you ad to yourself is going to last long. The reason Wikipedia added nofollows in the first place (at least the official reason) was to keep people from spamming the place.

[billbenson]

Ya, I wasn't just referring to wikipedia, but nofollow links in general although wikipedia should have a high level of credibility.

Have you ever seen studies or posts indicating G follows or doesn't follow "nofollow". My money goes on they do. If that is the case, my money would also be on the they use it in their algo as well.

[theGypsy]

Originally Posted by billbenson

Ya, I wasn't just referring to wikipedia, but nofollow links in general although wikipedia should have a high level of credibility.

Have you ever seen studies or posts indicating G follows or doesn't follow "nofollow". My money goes on they do. If that is the case, my money would also be on the they use it in their algo as well.

My guess is that they DO follow them.... simply don't weight them into the ranking process. Considering PR is a random walk along the link path, I'd expect them to maintain that, simply not counting them for ranking purposes....

[vangogh]

Dave I've noticed they do get followed, but like you I suspect they aren't being weighted in ranking. A couple of times though, I've seen pages ranking for specific phrases that were only used in anchor text on nofollowed links. I have a hunch nofollow is one of those things where what Google says they do and what they actually do, don't match up quite as well as they want us to believe.

[Business Attorney]

"Nofollow" is really a misnomer. As far as I know, Google has never said they don't follow the link to find and index pages.

From day one, their statement was:

"From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results." (Official Google Blog, "Preventing Comment Spam," January 18, 2005).

I have also seen some people say that "nofollow" links don't affect PageRank. I would guess that is true, but I have never seen Google make that statement. PageRank is by no means the only factor, or even necessarily a major factor, in determining the order of the search results.

[vangogh]

"nofollow" links don't affect PageRank

Google has said that exactly on a number of occasions. Originally nofollow was creating in combination with blog application developers as a way to say I don't know who left this comment and can't vouch for the link. Its use has evolved to saying I don't want to pass page rank to the page on the other side of this link.

Google's view on nofollow has changed a bit from their initial statements. Originally it was only meant to be used to fight comment spam, but it's certainly evolved beyond that.

I think Google has made claims to not following the link, though even if they never did it's a poorly named attribute. Anyone reading the word nofollow would naturally assume it means the link won't be followed.

[billbenson]

I have never really seen any use for PR other than other webmasters using it to evaluate linking. Because of its public inaccuracy, webmasters I know rarely use it as a guage anymore. The recip link days are gone anyway. I bet I haven't even looked at pr in 2 years. Well maybe once or twice.

I do know webmasters who have had better luck with dup content issues by iframes or htaccess redirects. No follow didn't work for this. An example would be an ecommerce site using manufacturer content. 1000 pages out there with the same content. Put the dup content in an iframe and some unique content on your page. The iframe explains the content and the add to the shopping cart. The unique content helps with seo.

When I said the nofollow didn't work, it wasn't an A/B test. They just found they had better results hiding the dup content than using nofollow.

[vangogh]

Bill the PR you're referring to is the PR you see in a toolbar. Yes it's mostly useless, but Google still has uses a real PR behind the scenes. The PR getting passed on not through links is the real PR.

[billbenson]

Originally Posted by vangogh

Bill the PR you're referring to is the PR you see in a toolbar. Yes it's mostly useless, but Google still has uses a real PR behind the scenes. The PR getting passed on not through links is the real PR.

Which is kind of a misnomer to call it Page Rank? Whatever factors go into how your page ranks in the serps, is there something internal to G that is actually "Page Rank"? Seems to me that it is just an algo that also spits out something called "page rank" pubically that at one time had some value. Internally, they just use the results from their algo of the day for serps placement?

[vangogh]

Yes, internally Google uses something called PageRank which is a measure of how pages link to one another and the importance of a given page based on that linking. I believe the Page part is named for Larry Page and now web page, which probably causes some confusion.

What you see in the toolbar (TBPR) is supposed to be a representation of what a given web page's internal PageRank is. However, as Google updates internal PageRank all the time and only updates the toolbar every few months the TBPR isn't really a true reflection of your internal PageRank. Internally it's unlikely a scale between 1-10 is used and over the years Google has increasingly shown a tendency to manually change the TBPR across a site to send a message to the site owner.

Part of the confusion about PageRank is that you have to understand it a little to realize which one someone is talking about. PageRank you see in the toolbar is mostly useless. It might still serve as a very quick and dirty approximation of how Google viewed the authority of a site whenever they last updated TBPR. It's not necessarily a measure of how well a page will rank for a given query.

Internally PageRank is still used. Matt Cutts has mentioned a few times that the more PR your site has, the more often and the deeper your site will get crawled. I'm sure it's also part of the algorithm when determining ranking, though not as much a part as it once might have been.

To futher confuse things there could be a topical PageRank, where a site might been seen as having great authority on a given topic, while having little to no authority on another topic. If you're site gets a link from a site on the same topic as your you might see a topical boost.

There's also the concept of general PageRank. Think of a site like whitehouse.gov. If whitehouse.gov links to you it's a good thing regardless of whether or not your site has anything to do with politics.