Rel no follow question

[PeterRota]

Hello,

I probably already know the answer to this question. But, When you use a rel no follow tag on an internal link or external link. Will the google bot still navigate to the link, in question? Thanks for your help.

[PeterRota]

Thanks guys for your help, i appreciate it.

[RohitPalit]

It's really a choice of Googlebot.

Generally, rel=nofollow doesn't mean that Google won't crawl the linked page. It's just useful because when you add a rel=nofollow attribute to a link you don't pass PageRank, trust, authority or any other positive signal to the linked page.

[gazzerman1]

YES it will still navigate to the link,

All you are telling Googlebot is that you do not endorse/trust the link and should not pass Pagerank/link juice to it.

If the page has a noindex meta tag then it will not index it, however it will still keep coming back to that page to check if the status has changed in any way. Same with a nofollow meta tag.

Google pretty much visits every page it can.

[GPainter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Interpretation by the individual search engines

While all engines that use the nofollow value exclude links that use it from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of it vary from search engine to search engine.

Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but it 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).

Yahoo! follows it, but excludes it from their ranking calculation

Bing respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not Bing follows the link.

Ask.com also respects the attribute