Proof That Yahoo Follows “No Follows”
April 26th, 2007 by CourtI have to laugh everytime I read sites talking about ‘no follows’, because no one ever mentions that Yahoo! actually counts them. I really don’t understand why people don’t tell it for what it is: a Google invention that only affects Google rankings. Google is of course the most important search engine, but isn’t the other 50% of the search engine market worth talking about?
Proof That Yahoo Follows ‘No Follows’:
Doing a search in Yahoo for linkdomain:courtneytuttle.com will show you all of the sites that are currently linking to pages in this site, which is CourtneyTuttle.com. Upon closer examination of the first 10 results, you will find that no less than three have “no follows” on them. Here is a cut screen shot of one of them:
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Go ahead, try it out! I bet that Yahoo is following some of your ‘no follow’ links too.
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April 26th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
interesting, reason why a lot of blogs have more links in yahoo than google, honestly google is startng to get a little too “big boyz” for me, i’m writing a post about this in fact.
Google “invented” a lot of stuff (and a lot of nice stuff) but since some time they’re kinda loosing it a little.
well according to alexa (which is maybe not super accurate) yahoo gets more traffic than google
April 27th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Yeah it’s very funny! Yahoo reports 500+ links for me, and 98% of them are nofollow blogs!
I wish Technorati would pick them up! They have yet to pick up most of the blogs I comment on, which in fact are nofollow blogs. How bizarre!
April 29th, 2007 at 1:25 am
I don’t use the nofollow attribute on my site, as in my view, it is doing 1 good thing for search engines and 1 bad thing for my visitors/friends/readers:
1 Good thing for Search Engines like Google:
The nofollow attribute helps them index less aggressively, thus helping their crawlers be more efficient. Basically, we are doing their job for free.
1 Bad thing for my visitors/friends/readers:
Their sites will not get indexed in search engines for different keywords. I want everyone to get their sites more popularity in the search engines, and I don’t mind having no nofollow attribute. If a spam comment does go through, I will take care of it instead of penalizing everyone, including innocent people. There are a few plugins that allow the nofollow attribute to be removed after a few days, but consider this: many blogs are setup so that a search engine does not revisit a new post until after a month or so. That means by the time a search engine starts following a url in a comment [because of the nofollow attribute expiring through a plugin], the search engine will already consider a site too old in relation to the post in question.
May 5th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Hey, Google follows the link too. The ‘nofollow’ attribute does NOT count the PR leaking to the link/site attributed with the ‘rel=nofollow’ tag.
May 27th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Google may follow the link, but Yahoo gives credit for the link.
May 27th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Interesting find. Yahoo does however seem to obey noindex in robots.txt
May 27th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Very true!
May 30th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Court,
I told you just now that my Technorati ranking is still ++30,000.
After I left your blog,I
just felt the urge of checking my template HTML. And Bingo !The NOfollow is there ! Has it got to do with the changes of templates that I try once in a while ?
Thanks for your advice.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Yes it is! When you change your template with Blogger you are probably removing the code that took away the nofollow. It won’t really affect your rankings though, it just makes it so you’re not giving away links to your commentators!
January 26th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
[…] Now take into consideration that Yahoo ignores no-follows, which accounts for this great number of back links. If you don’t believe me, check out Court’s post: Proof That Yahoo Follows “No Follows” […]
April 14th, 2008 at 4:24 am
The no-follow attribute is a subject of lively debate wherever it is encountered on blogs / forums and other discussion groups. It is a Google-only phenomenon, and it basically only blocks the transferral of PageRank link love, the bots still take note of these links.
When talking Yahoo of course, this attribute doesn’t affect their bots or ranking, for that matter. A natural looking link profile will have approx 2/3 of links as no-follow with the rest as do-follow. Beware trying to get too high a percentage of links as do-follow, as this will also appear contrived to the google bots.