Do Nofollow Links Count?

A question often asked on many SEO forums, and usually answered along the lines of “they are followed, but don’t pass any power”. However, one blogger ran a little experiment a few months ago and came up with some interesting results.

First of all, a short background. For those of you who don’t know what a “nofollow” link is, it is quite simply a link on a web page with a ‘rel’ attribute of ‘nofollow’. It was first introduced to help webmasters tell Google (and other search engines) which links on their site they value and which they don’t - for example, bloggers could add a ‘nofollow’ attribute to any links left in user-contributed comments (a classic method of spamming for many black hatters!). As stated earlier, it was assumed that Google would still visit the site linked to under a nofollow but wouldn’t pass any ‘link juice’ to it.

But in an experiment, ’social marketing dude’ Ben Fisher conducted an interesting study where he wrote a review of the Spiderman 3 game for the xBox and then commented on various blogs, linking back to his own site with the unique phrase of ‘piderman 3′ (sic).

The interesting result of the study was that even though the links were all nofollow and there was no mention of the phrase ‘piderman 3′ in his review, he still managed to rank for this somewhat uncompetitive phrase. It may be that there was some variable Ben Fisher overlooked in the experiment, but the obvious conclusion to draw is that nofollow links do indeed pass some power.

Rik
SEO Programmer

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1 Comment

1. A very interesting observation. I think this would be worth coming back to in a few months to see the latest position.

   Comment by mark December 7, 2007 @ 10:27 am

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