I know (or hope to god) that everyone knows what a nofollow is…if you don’t, you just slap a little rel=”nofollow” into your code and a search engine should not influence the link target’s ranking. You can do this if you’re unsure whether you want to give your stamp of approval to a site you link to, for example. I am not going to waste anyone’s time discussing this really but I do want to touch on a point that a fellow SEO brought up recently.
It’s good practice to check to make sure that someone who has given you a link has not also given you a nofollow, unless you asked for it for some religious reason. Apparently there have been some issues with sites putting in the nice link WITHOUT a nofollow, then once you’ve checked the code and decided to go surf porn or watch Britcom reruns, the developer/evil bastard who controls the link/hill person decides to put the nofollow in. This can happen days or weeks in so just take precautions and keep a check on critical inbound links every now and then. Also, if you notice anyone doing this to you please let me know and I will visit the person in the small hours of the night and put a bat up his/her nightdress.
It’s also worth pointing out that you should check to see that the page where they’ve put your link is crawlable so check the robots.txt file too. And just in general, don’t transport Dracula at night. It’s ill advised.
It could be pedantic, but nofollowed links most certainly still do help another site’s *rankings*. I think that you’re confusing pagerank with a site’s rankings in the SERPs, as Google has stated that nofollow is there to prevent passing pagerank, and we shouldn’t assume it does anything else.
That, and many experiments done by myself and others have shown that nofollowed links indeed do count. They just don’t pass pagerank.
Wow what an old post…I can barely remember writing this. My assumption was based on rankings being somehow related to PageRank, actually, according to the theory that some believe that says a site with a higher PR will outrank a site with a lower PR. Thus, if you aren’t getting the benefit of the link juice, your rankings may not improve.
Ah, of course.
“A nofollowed link is better than nothing” is all I’m really trying to say.
I have to agree with that 100%.