Nofollow Means NoVote

When the tag nofollow came was introduced it was sorely misnamed. The correct name for the tag should of been noVote or IDoNotVoucheForThisLink. There remains a contant misunderstanding about this tag. For starters you would think that adding a nofollow tag to a link would mean that the major SERPS would just fly right past it, that is the furthest thing from the truth. It has been proven that both Google and Yahoo will indeed crawl the link and the jury is still out on exact proof that MSN Live crawls it.

With Google, you do not help your rank with a link tagged with nofollow, that has been known for sometime. Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already.

With Yahoo, you also do not get link juice or help yourself in the rankings as it excludes it from their ranking calculation. Yahoo will follow it and even index the resulting page if it is not indexed.

With MSN they thus far respect the nofollow tag as in not counting the link in their ranking as well, but it is not proven whether or not MSN truly follows the link or not.

So thus the fact that it should have been named noVote or IDoNotVoucheForThisLink as all 3 major SERPS claim no improvement in rank if a link is tagged with nofollow.

Here is a great interview I had bookmarked. It is a recent interview with Yahoo's own Priyank Garg. Garg is the director of product management for Yahoo Search Technology, YST is the team responsible for the functionality of Yahoo’s Web search engine that includes crawling, indexing, ranking, summarizing and spelling Web search functions along with products for webmasters, such as Site Explorer. Make sure to read it twice as it is specific to the way Yahoo treats the nofollow tag.

I hope this clears up the misconception of what the nofollow tag does and does not do.

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