nofollow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still "follow" the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.".

[edit] Interpretation by the individual search engines

While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.^[7][8]

• Google takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).^[8] Links with "nofollow" are included in the backlinks reporting data at Google's Webmaster Central.^[9]
• Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
• MSN Search respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.
• Ask.com does not use the attribute for anything.

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