Does Google take notice of nofollow links?
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Does Google take any notice of nofollow links, they seem to count for something but don't know how much.
Any experience? -
Cyrus Shepard went into some of the value of nofollows on a Whiteboard Friday in the past year or two. There was a fair amount of discussion about it in the comments. Scroll through those and you should get a decent idea of how everybody thinks about them.
Think about it this way: Google isn't giving you any value from the link, but they still use it for crawling, and they also value all kinds of on-page signals beyond just links. So there can be value to the signals around a link even if the link itself passes no value. And there can be value to a link even if there is no ranking value to it—though I think the whole "referral traffic" thing is wildly overblown, never seen anybody get more than like 4 visits from a comment. But they can help you build communities/relationships online.
Plus there's all kinds of things like co-occurrence that Google uses that I suppose, hypothetically, could possibly be a benefit from nofollow links in the right context, even non-editorial links. Check Bill Slawski's blog for more on that!
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Nofollow links were created to keep people from gaming the system. Google doesn't give you credit for nofollow links, but it's still a great way of getting referral traffic as well as having a well balanced and natural looking link profile. As long as a link is relevant to you/your business, it can still be worth it.
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Matt Cutts of google - answers that question in the following clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSEqypgIJME
It is enjoyable when you can go straight to the source. Hope that assists.
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Nofollow links do not contribute to any ranking value for the majority of search engines, such as Google and Bing. You could have a nofollow link on Wikipedia or even Google's homepage but that link won't count when it comes to increasing your rankings. However. that does not imply that the link is not valuable!
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