Nofollow Does Pass Anchor Text

Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page.

How Google says they handle nofollowed links

Google states that their engine takes nofollow literally and does not pass anchor text.

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. (source)

Matt Cutts continues this stance in a post on page sculpting stating that nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed”.

[*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results. (source)

Dave Naylor , a UK SEO, also maintains the same position in a post about 5 things that stop anchor text being passed.

Yep not rocket science but when was the last time you actually checked it in an SEO lab environment ? well with 99% certainty I can say that this

rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk”>Dave Naylor</a>
will not pass the “Dave Naylor” link text to the target page

Well, I can say with 99.9% certainty from my own test data that nofollow appears to indeed pass anchor text.

As you can see from the Google results displayed above it appears that the anchor text is being passed through 2 robots.txt nofollow and 1 meta nofollow to Dave’s site. (sorry Dave – I needed an example).

My conclusion is the anchor text is passed through a nofollow link in both Google and Yahoo.

What do you think? Is the anchor text being passed or not?

Resources used for link analysis:

SEO Elite
Google
Yahoo

This entry was written by Greg, posted on April 19, 2010 at 9:46 pm, and filed under Link Building and tagged .
  • Mark A

    I don't believe anchor text is followed in Google – of course it will still be there for tools such as SEO Elite to scrape and display, but google is aware of the links nofollow status, so will know not give it any value regardless.

    I could be wrong though, there's a possibility I'm not understanding your explanation here, so if you could further explain why the above is proof that anchopr text is giving weight from a nofollow link, then please do!!

  • gregray

    I didn't say the anchor text was followed (weighted), simply that the link text was being passed.

    Dave stated in his post that the nofollow attribute would not pass link text. I simply found, through a little testing, that to be an incorrect conclusion.

    Would you agree that if the anchor text wasn't passed the results should be n/a as shown in the 4th result down in my screen shot?

    For the record I don't fret whether a link is a nofollow. IMHO there is to much hoopla around the whole thing and not enough hard evidence one way or the other to discount the links totally.

  • http://www.clubnetsearchmarketing.co.uk/ zigojacko

    We can't view your findings via the image as it's not linked and the one displayed is too small.

    I've always been dubious whether the nofollow attribute does not pass any anchor text on, I've always had an incline that it does although never tested as you have.

    I would definately still say that a nofollow attributed link can pass on relevancy and trust however, and that when building a healthy link profile, nofollow links should be included for more naturally built links.

  • gregray

    Sorry about the image quality…the theme I'm using here is a little small in width. However you should be able to right click the image and view it full sized in another window.

  • http://www.lovelive.fr Rencontre

    This is exactly the kind of topic I cannot find in french. Your explanation seems nice, but the picture is too small and I… I don’t understand the logic behind your conclusion (not forgetting that I don’t know what your tool does).
    Would you recommend link building with nofollow then ?

  • Anonymous

    In my mind all follow links screams of deliberate manipulation of link building.

    I’m of the thinking that a good mix of all types of links, follow and nofollow in this case, appears as a more natural incoming link structure.

  • Mark A

    Hi Gregray,

    The “NO” in the 4th result you point out is the scraper telling you the backlink no longer exist at the target URL.

    Remember, most of these SEO tools scrape Yahoo SiteXplorer for the actual link data, the trouble is, Yahoo is far from perfect and often out of date. So whilst the link will be scraped, that’s no indication that it still exists on the target site.

    Once the link has been scraped from Yahoo, the tool will then scrape the actual page to see if the backlink still exists, the “NO” just means either there has been an error scraping the destination URL, or in most cases, that the backlink is simply no longer exists – which also accounts for the N/A in the anchor text section.

    Hundreds of High PR followed backlinks with identical anchor text built in a short period of time to a new site could certainly look a little unnatural, but personally I’ve never had any problems so far. I think the most important thing is to actually mix up the anchor text a bit – but followed links definately have a far more drastic effect on serps than nofollowed anchor text links. The one thing I would discount is PR, my testing seems to have shown that so long as the link is followed, the anchor text will certainly have the desired effect regardless of PR. If you are in an especially competitive environment, then PR could play a more important role, although I’d say domain age of the site linking to you is a fairly important factor right now too, alongside relevancy.