Actually,
the rel=nofollow attribute should
prevent search engines from following
special links. Some webmasters
might have found out that nofollow
links will help your search engine
rankings though.
What is the rel=nofollow
attribute?
The nofollow link attribute
has been introduced by Google
in 2005. It is intended to
reduce the effectiveness of
link spamming in blogs and
online forums. A link with
the rel=nofollow attribute
looks like this:
<a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>
The official claim is that
links with the rel=nofollow
attribute do not influence
the search engine rankings
of the target page. In addition
to Google, Yahoo and MSN also
support the rel=nofollow attribute.
Links with the nofollow
attribute don't count. Or
do they?
This month, the webmaster
of a gaming site did a little test.
He wrote an article about
the SpiderMan 3 game in one
of his blogs and then he added
comments in other blogs.
The comments in the other
blogs contained links to his
SpiderMan 3 article. The special
thing about these links was
that they contained the text "piderman
3" and a nofollow attribute.
After a few days, his site
ranked on the first result
page on Google for "piderman
3".
Does this mean that
that Google counts nofollow
links?
Some webmasters think that
the experiment might prove
that Google counts nofollow
links. However, a few factors
can also influence the ranking
of the article page:
- The search term "piderman
3" appears on
the page as part of "SpiderMan
3". That means
that the page can also rank
because of the words on
the page. As the article
was posted on a blog page,
the word also appears in
the website navigation links
on the site.
- Google does not only search
for the direct keyword occurrences
on the page and in link texts.
Google also searches for misspelled
versions of the words and
related keywords.
If you search for "piderman 3" on Google then Google
will ask you "Did you mean Spiderman 3?" so they
know the correct term that you were looking for.
Unfortunately, this little
experiment cannot prove whether
Google counts nofollow links
or not. The data is not good
enough.
However, it is indisputable
that links are extremely important
to get high rankings on Google.
To get high rankings on Google
and other major search engines,
it is important to have both optimized
web page content and good
inbound links.
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