May 24th, 2007 by admin 3,057 Views
The evil John Chow tries to make money out of everything…He does not even give credit to those people that are adding content to his website by commenting his posts.
Recently he offered his commentators to remove the “nofollow” tag of their comment links for 10$/month. I left a comment to his article saying that:
Actually Google considers nofollow links as many expirements on this topic prooved. I would never pay to get the nofollow tag removed from a comment link cause a comment link is not worth even 1$ a month with or without nofollow tag…
To proof what I have said and to help the commentators of JohnChow.com, before they are going to throw away 10$/month, I collected a lot of information about webmasters that did experiments with nofollow links.
Neil Patel - Do Nofollow links count?
Generally we say that nofollow links don’t count, but Ben Fisher actually found that they do help with ranking based on a small experiment he ran.
Steven Bradley - How does Google really treat Nofollow links?
I have a hard time believing Google’s claims. When I check links in Webmaster Tools I can tell you that they show backlinks to pages where the only inbound link has rel=”nofollow” applied. If Googlebot didn’t follow that link how could they show it as a backlink?
SEO Black Hat - Nofollow and how Google really verifies links
Now, on to what Google is doing to Verify links. Because Google has so much market penetration with Analytics and the Google Toolbar, they can look at a link and verify it’s integrity (to some extent) by how many users actually click the link. If a link is relevant, it will have a higher clickthrough rate than one that is not. If a link is hidden or obscured, it will have a lower or almost non existent click through rate. In this manner, Google is using user behavior to verify the links.
And when you think about it, this really makes more sense. If a link is tagged “nofollow” but people keep clicking it and continue to surf when they get to the destination site, then who are you gonna trust? The webmaster who may not even know that his CMS put up a nofollow? Or the millions of users who click the link and seemed, at least algorithmically, to enjoy the content?
The answer is pretty obvious.
Miamacs from Webmaster World says:
The rel nofollow attribute applied on a single link doesn’t mean “don’t crawl this link”.
It doesn’t even mean “don’t show me as someone who links to this page”.
There are many other articles and experiments about this topic, but these are the ones I consider the most interesting.
Conclusions (if you don’t want to read all the articles mentioned above)
- The rel nofollow attribute applied on a single link doesn’t mean “don’t crawl this link”.
- Nofollow links get indexed by Google
- Nofollow means “do not pass any recommendations. Don’t pass a vote”
Let’s get back to John Chow who wants 10$/month to remove the nofollow tag from the comment links. The only good thing by getting the nofollow tag removed is that his articles would start to pass some PageRank to paying commentators.
But is it really worth paying 10$/month to have a backlink from a page that has hundreds of outgoing and non-related links?
Absolutely NOT.
Thanks–I’d wondered about the nofollow links after reading that Wordpress uses them and there are plugins to remove them which some readers commented weren’t necessary since they don’t work anyway. If that makes sense:) Which it does after reading your analysis.
[…] extra money. But before you hand him over the money, you might want to read the following article: Nofollow links get indexed by Google. This article is one of the many great articles of LinkRain […]
Thanks for clearing up the confusion with the no follow link. $10/month is very evil isn’t it? Shame on you John
Yes it’s evil and only SEO newbies are going spend 10$/month to get the “no follow” attribute removed from their comment links…
John Chow pulled controversy marketing on you.
I have seen so many John Chow is bad blog post that its really funny because he has everyone talking about him. I would love to see the traffic stats on his site.
He is getting around 10.000 unique visitors a day. I have seen many bad blog posts too and even if send him traffic by writing something bad about his blog, I want to let people know that John is nothing else than a scammer.
Weird thing about JohnChow is the fact that scammer or not…he’s pulling in 10,000 uniques per month. And another fact is you can find so many “wannabe” JohnChow Blogs popping up with the same contents and same blog themes. Even the blog titles are the same!! I wonder who’s copying who…point in case, have a look at JohnChow’s blog title and then ProBlogger’s….anyone who think’s I may be wrong?
Oopss…sorry I might have overstated on how many uniques he’s getting..but I think everyone know he’s getting a lot of traffic anyway
He’s getting 10.000/day, not a month
You are absolutly right, there are hundreds od Jhon Chow “wannebe’s”.
I assure you that I’m not on of these…because I’m using the same blog template (It’s one of the best looking themes created for Wordpress ever).
I think that Jhon started to copy Problogger. Darren Rowse seems much more professional to me.
[…] Another solution could be to place a “nofollow” tag on each paid link, but actually Google is indexing links with a “nofollow” tag… And what about Paid Web Directories? I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think […]
I came across your site on PlugIM. Thought I would share a good test we did with the nofollow attribute. Zero results for the term we used when we began. Mr. Cutts site still hasn’t shown up, so the nofollow might work more than we think.
Nofollow Test
(http://blog.linkworth.com/let-us-test-no-follow/)
seems to be an interesting experiment. I have recently analyzed my website with a backlink checker tool that listed also a lot of nofollow links pointing to my site…
Before you, some other webmaster tried a test like these and they actually all got the same result “Google is indexing Nofollow links”.
Nice Article Link rain . I liked it , and really its not worth to buy links when you are commenting in somebody’s post .According to your Article its clear that it will get indexed in Google and will be crawled.
Thanks for the information.
[…] Nofollow Links Get Indexed by Google […]
Thank you for this post, since it makes things more clear to me. I just started a brand new blog which is not being indexed by google yet, and it will be interesting to see whether it is going to be indexed some time soon just having some nofollow links.
I think Google counts no follow links. Actually it depend upon the site where your link exits. If it’s not a new website then Google counts the links!!
The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.
i think it helps indexing
thanks
This article clear things up for me. Thanks for showing us the truth about this case. I have been wondering about such things back then. Thank you for posting the article.