Nofollow Does Pass Anchor Text

April 19, 2010 – 9:46 pm

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

By Greg | Posted in Link Building | Tagged | View Comments

Foothills Elementary Fun Run

April 15, 2010 – 8:50 am

My grandsons elementary school is holding a 5k run/walk this weekend, April 17th 2010. Only a few days away and things are coming together.

Schedule:
Race Day Sign Up: 8:30 – 9:45 am
5k (3.1 mile) Run: 10:00 am
1 mile Walk: 10:01 am
Coursed Closed: 11:30 am

Fees:

Pre-Race Day
Individuals: $10.00
Student with Parent: $15.00
Family: $20.00

Race Day:
Individuals: $12.00
Student with Parent: $17.00
Family: $22.00

Location:
Foothills Elementary School
13165 W Ohio Avenue
Lakewood, CO 80228

How to Sign Up
Mail or drop off the completed entry form by April 15th to the Foothills Elementary school.

Awards
All participants will receive a ribbon

Timing
There will be NO official timing for this event as this is a fun run

For more information you can surf on over to the Foothills Fun Run website. Funds raised from the fun run will be used to benefit the PTA and youth playground equipment.

By Greg | Posted in Stuff | View Comments

Why You Always Register Your Own Domain Name

April 14, 2010 – 11:08 pm

Feng shui Luopan compass

Sometimes I dismiss what is common sense to me not realizing there are plenty of people out there that, admittedly, do not have one tech savvy bone in their body – or so they think.

Today I received a call from a good friend who is bringing her Feng Shui business online. She was frantic. Her site was gone and she had no way of fixing it. She felt helpless and had no idea what to do and feared months of work was gone.

Once I got the full story on what had transpired over the last several weeks I was able to help her get it resolved. The short of the story is she had been requesting changes to her site for several weeks and the hosting/web designer had assured her the changes would be made. Sad thing is the changes were not made. Then she woke up this morning and her site had vanished.

With this sudden disappearance of the site and the circumstances surrounding the event I had my suspicions. I took a quick look  at the url and sure enough her domain name was redirecting to her hosts home page. I figured no problem, it’s a new domain with no established incoming links I’ll just give her space on my servers and she can redirect the domain to my name servers. Problem solved.

Well, not so fast. You see she had her hosting company, a GoDaddy reseller, register the domain name for her, which they did. But – and a big but –  the provider registered the domain name in their name not hers. And to make things clear the domain name is a branding name for her company.

In the end we setup an account up at GoDaddy and got her hosting company to transfer the domain into her name. I walked her through the account setup in less than 5 minutes. Now she has 10 tech savvy bones.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Never, I repeat, NEVER let someone else register your domain name for you. I’ve heard stories of less-than-reputable web hosts that registered the domain under their own name, making them the owner of the domain rather than you, then charging outrageous fees for the use of the name later  . If someone else places themselves as the owner of your domain name there is little you can do, outside of a lawsuit, to get it back.

By Greg | Posted in Local Search | Tagged | View Comments