Saw some interesting data in our Google Webmaster Tools today. They show 17 new links coming into our website from realestatewebmasters.com. Yes, from the footer of my posts.

Interesting that they count those as links even though they have the nofollow attribute on them. Just goes to prove that nofollow is a bit of a misnomer, Google does "follow" those links, and clearly knows about them, they just don't pass link juice through them. Though it would be interesting to do a test and see if that is true as well.

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Pure | Costa Rica Real Estate <-- Exchange Links with us

Google entire object in life is to collect data. If you havent noticed, google will have cataloged all the data in the world shortly, and then that is when their stock really goes thru the roof. But all kidding aside...actually Im not kidding, that is googles function, to catalog any and all data...period!

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Tampa Real Estate | Tampa Foreclosures | Tampa Real Estate Blog

Team Masse services the Tampa Bay Real Estate market as well as the following areas: Apollo Beach, Riverview, Ruskin, Brandon, Lithia, Valrico, Gibsonton, South Tampa, and Channelside District along with St Petersburg and Clearwater. Referals are always welcomed and given.

all links are good with or w/o nofollow

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San Diego Real Estate | San Diego Foreclosures | San Diego Short Sales

Actually, Google doesn't include those links in Googlebot's queue. It does get archived as a set of links found on a page, and you will see nofollow links inside Webmaster Tools. But that does not mean that Googlebot follows those links to their destination and crawls the content of a target page.

It is confusing, because Matt Cutts has said that nofollow links are "dropped from the web graph." Keep in mind, Google used to store backlink data meant to be used specifically for "link" commands in a separate database. Google only showed a partial link data due mainly to storage limitations. At the beginning, Google only showed links above TBPR 4 or so. That gave webmasters the wrong impression that it was only worth pursuing links from pages above TBPR 4. Dave Nayor talked to Matt about this and suggested Google show a random sample - which Matt thought was a good idea and implemented.

Now, the link data inside Webmaster Tools is probably stored in a much bigger database. That said, what gets stored there is not necessarily a result of Googlebot following every link and storing the resulting linkage data. For example, if you scrape a page, you can use regexp or some other means to fish out URLs from that page and store them in a database without having to follow each of those links.

If they did not follow those links to the destination page then they would not have found the code on my page that tells them to put the links in my queue. IMHO, Google does follow no follow links.

I need more proof that they don't besides what MC says. Matt is not google and some of what he says has been proven wrong repeatedly.

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Serving all your Outer Banks real estate needs and for the latest OBX events visit the Outer Banks Community Forum.

Heh, that's not how Googlebot works. It's one thing to be skeptical about what a Googler says, its another thing to base your opinions on fantasy.

This doesn't directly address the issue, but see miamic's comment on WMW for more details on how several engines handle nofollow:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3436630.htm

That's posted back in Sept, so what was true then may not be true now.

It's my understanding also that nofollows are indeed followed but do not give weight to ranking on the followed to page.

It can be very confusing flushing out this and that in detail. IMO, only the devs at G know for sure and they never talk.

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Jessie: Panama City Beach Real Estate, Panama City Real Estate and Panama City Beach Condos

I read the test by miamic and the posters following were not convinced. The limited test only showed that G will not index a page from a nofollow link, it doesn't prove they don't follow a nofollow link.

Matt can be quoted taking both sides of this issue. G spins what they say, and for good reason.

So explain to me how there can be nofollow links in WMT. I don't want to base my opinions on fantasy.

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Serving all your Outer Banks real estate needs and for the latest OBX events visit the Outer Banks Community Forum.

Exactly. That's why I said the test doesn't address the issue.

Are you kidding? He's been saying the same thing all throughout 2007 - that nofollows are never followed.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions...gles-spam-guru

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/...tt-cutts.shtml

That link probably contains the most in-depth information about nofollow/noindex/robots.txt you'll find to date.

Quote:

What is more interesting is his statement that robots.txt disallowed pages still accumulate PageRank:

Matt Cutts is a mouthpiece of Google and therefore he will spin disputes in a way that makes Google look good. He will also give evasive answers when not doing so will disclose too much of the secret sauce.

But if Matt Cutt says Googlebot doesn't follow nofollow links, that's far more credible than 10 expert SEOs telling me Googlebot follows nofollow links. In this case, he has no motive to lie.

Besides, just because you see a nofollowed link show up in Webmaster Tools doesn't mean it was crawled.