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

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Nofollow Does Pass Anchor Text

Search engines take numerous variables into consideration when displaying websites inside their natural search results depending on the search terms you use.

Backlinks are just one of these many factors.

Unfortunately only a small number of people,who are sworn to secrecy, know the complete algorithm that is used. This makes it real tough to know what links are worth perusing that would benefit your domain the most.

And alas not all search engines are created equal. Even though there might be some aspects of the algorithm that are comparable to say Google, Yahoo and Bing have their own ’secret sauce’ whenever figuring out rankings.

Things such as the domain age, quality of content, the actual domain name, and on and on establish where your website falls whenever people do a search.

Backlinks play a huge, but not fully known, roll in driving a ton of visitors to your website and in many cases it helps with SEO. Plus it gets you traffic from the sites you are receiving backlinks from.

If you would like to drive top quality traffic to your web site – you need backlinks. Lots of them. And if you want to be found in the search engines for short and long-tail keywords, you need backlinks from several other websites using those words as anchor text that link back to the web page you’re trying to rank for.

Don’t make the error that many people do – and that’s just focusing on building backlinks to their home page. They are missing out on a great deal extra traffic!

Don’t just build links to your home page for the main keyword(s) you’re targeting, but dig deeper and get backlinks for longer-tail keywords you’re targeting within a blog post or an individual page on your website.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Why You Need Backlinks

What should be done about black hats?

Can I be “slapped” for over optimizing anchor text in my incoming links?

Do social networking sites work for leveraging traffic to your site?

50 SEO’s One Question

What should we do with the Black Hats? My buddy went to Search Engine Strategies 2009 in London and asked every SEO the same question.

Avoid the Google -50 penalty with anchor text variations

Christoph C. Cemper talks about the recent Google changes on Aug 2009 and Sept 2009 and the newly changed -50 penalties on a keyword & page level due to over optimization of anchor texts.

SEO Tip Utilizing Anchor Text

Not all sites will allow you to utilize anchor text and links to boost your popularity but you still can use the sites to your advantage to get the word out on your web site.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Banned to Australia, Leveraging Social Network Sites and the Google -50 Penalty

Over the past few years it has become apparent to me that search engines rank web pages in relation to a keyword based on their perception of the authority of that page in relation to that keyword. What a mouth full huh?  In layman’s terms; If your site is about courier services then the content of  the website or page page should be on that topic.

There are a lot of definitions of authority but I believe Google views authority in terms of quantity and quality of links that point to your website. Also from websites that also has quantity and quality pointing to them.

Here are a few of my views on what factors make up a good link -

• Static one way links are better than reciprocal links
• Links from higher PR websites (more authority) are better
• Links from websites with the same theme relevance as the websites they link to are better
• Links that contain the keyword phrase are better
• Links from .edu and .gov rock!

Authority

Authority is a indicator of how much a particular website or a particular web page is considered the “go to” source on a particular topic (keyword).

Back link

Back link, or incoming link, is a term used to describe links that are on other web properties pointing your your website.

Static link

A static link is a link from a website that points to you but you don’t have a link on your website pointing to them. If you have a website that has a large number of good quality static one way back links pointing to it then Google will perceive that that website has authority in relation to the keywords that the website is optimized for.

Reciprocal link

A reciprocal link is when you link to them and they link to you. I wouldn’t recommend exchanging links with other websites.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the words used on other peoples web site that form the link back to you. Good anchor text is not the words click here or check this out, rather good anchor text contains the keywords that are relevant to your sites theme and what you want to rank for.

Theme

Lets say your websites theme is  about courier services. You would not want a link from a website that was perceived by Google to be about seo, nor would you want to link to a website about seo. There is no relevance between the two sites and the link, thus is given less consideration.

.edu – .gov

Back links from .edu and .gov are much harder to get but if you can get them they are golden!

There are other factors that might lead to ranking such as the age of the domain, on page optimization and content but by far the websites that rank highest in the search results tend to have the most back links.

Post from: Denver SEO - Local Search Expert

Link Building Factors To Obtaining High Rankings