Do Nofollow Links Affect Rankings?

After coming across Social Dude’s (Ben Fisher’s) experiment on nofollowed links it both answered and raised many questions about the value of a nofollow link. While the results were interesting they were not definitive taking into account the many different factors that could have affected the results.

For those of you who don’t know what the experiment was, he created a page containing a review on Spiderman 3 the game and posted it on his games review site. He then created a large amount of links from blog comments containing the keyword “piderman 3″. The websites ranking then seemingly improved for the term piderman 3, despite the fact that these blog comments had the nofollow attrbute attached to them.

The results are useful, but for a number of reasons they aren’t strong enough to draw any conclusions from.

1. The page in question actally contained the term piderman 3 even if it was contained in the term spiderman 3. Google could rank the page based on content alone.
2. When Google detects a search that appears to be misspelled it will bring up alternative results for the correct spelling. Which happens in this case.
3. Links from his own blog will be passing value and they will also include they term in question. These have not been taken into account as they will not have the nofollow attribute attached.
4. There were no specific timeframes tracked or rankings measured. Testing is vital when trying to gain conclusions. Any changes in the position could be affected by factors in Google’s algorithm such as Query Deserves Freshness which would lead to a boost in rankings for an initial period of time.

In order to create a more controlled environment for the experiment I have decided to approach it in a similar way but control a few more of the factors.

I will be targeting two keywords. The first term I will be targeting will be ” gomesian “. I have chosen this because it has about one thousand results for it and will allow for good measurement of the effect on rankings.

The second term that will be used will not appear anywhere in the text anywhere on the blog. It will not appear in the title and therefore will not be contained in any links to the post. Instead it has been displayed inside the image below (no alt tag) so you can all see what I’m working towards. This will show if Google uses the nofollow tag to understand what the website is about.

This will remove any doubt about whether Google is ranking the website based on the content on the page. We all know it’s possible to rank on Google based only on anchor text, just have a look at adobe ranking first for the term “click here” without it appearing anywhere on the page.

The phrases that I have chosen will not bring up any suggested terms (did you mean?) and so this will hopefully avoid Google placing in any other unwanted results.

The rankings on these two keywords will be tracked and reported across Google, Yahoo and Bing, and updated on this post after enough information is gathered.

RESULTS

So I’ve tracked the results for a month now, I was considering going on for longer but maybe another time. Now at the start of this post I mentioned reaons why social dudes experiments wasn’t strong enough to draw conclusions from. It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t point out the flaws in my own experiment. I’m sure there are more but here are a few for now.

1. As I posted comments on blogs sometimes they displayed the keyword I used, without placing it in a link. This has then resulted in more websites ranking for that phrase thus making the rankings a bit off.
2. The rankings are for search engines showing results for only pages from the UK, this could be affecting the results in some way.
3. Due to the short period of time there could be other factors that come into play, such as QDF (query deserves freshness) that would affect the positions.
4. By building so many links in such a short space of time I may have inadvertently tripped some sort of spam filter which may be affecting the results.

So please keep these thoughts in mind. This is by no accounts a complete experiment, nor does it attempt to put forward the theory or process by which search engines value nofollow links. It is there to provide you with my results, and to encourage people to put forward their results and findings also.

Anyway, onto the results. the first chart here shows you the rankings for the term “gomesian”. You will notice that Bing is not included on this chart, but for some reason, it hasn’t decided to visit. Yahoo seems to have settled on my position being number 4, I am confident I would have been able to get the number 2 position if it hadn’t been for some of the blogs I have commented on being ranked above me. This is the reason for the decrease down to 4th place. I am not sure as to what is happening with Google here, make of it what you will. Left axis is ranking and right axis is amount of backlinks. The days are listed along the bottom.

The second chart shows the rankings for the second term. What is interesting about this one is that it seems to help make more sense of the other chart. It appears that Google is true to it’s word and does not use a nofollowed link to pass on any PR or determine page relevancy. What it does show is that Yahoo will use a nofollowed link to determine the relevance of a page that it links to, even if the anchor text does not appear anywhere on the target page. This is surprising, because when Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal contacted the search engines to ask them how they treat nofollowed links, Yahoo’s response was

Yahoo : As promised in the semantics for the ‘no follow’ tag, the anchor text and attribution will not be carried over to the target of a ‘no follow’ link.

Loren’s post was written a couple of years ago, so I am not sure if Yahoo have changed their algorithmns or if there is something I am overlooking. As far as I can see Yahoo is using the anchor text of nofollowed links to determine what the linked to page is about, and then ranking the page on that search term even if it doesn’t contain the keyword anywhere on the website.

Ideally there is a lot more information I would like to be getting about the value of a nofollow link, I’m sure there is a whole load of data to get from their usage. For example, looking at how nofollof links affect existing PR, rankings, or if nofollow tags can make a backlink profile look more natural. If anyone has any ideas or would like to work together hit me up in the comments, I’m sure there’s a lot more to learn.

Did you know that when you link to one of my posts I aim to provide a search engine friendly, contextual link back to your website where possible? Also after a couple of relevant comments your links will be approved as dofollowed. Why wait to get involved?