David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

The nofollow attribute is supposed to mean no follow.  More specifically, the major search engines have committed to not following any link that has a nofollow attribute attached.  So why do we see Yahoo following links from comments in Matt Cutts blog?  Here is an example of where Yahoo’s SiteExplorer lists at least two comments in blog posts as backlinks: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seobuzzbox.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u

Check the source code in the blog:

<a href=’http://www.seobuzzbox.com’ rel=’external nofollow’>Aaron Pratt</a>

Here is another example:  https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkseer.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u

Do those links factor into Yahoo’s algorithm?  Who knows?  But just the fact that they are being reported…

Saaaaayy … this wouldn’t be one of those tricks to mess with webmasters’ minds, would it?  Like that silly green PageRank bar that means so little and has cost so many sleepless nights and missed link exchanges?

I would love to hear your opinions on this. 
  

 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Google, Yahoo, nofollow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.