email: ebobnar at gmail.com

Affordable SEO Consulting for the Results-Oriented Online Business.

Welcome to my blog. Here's a list of my best posts, as well as a complete archive of everything I've ever blogged about.

« More AdWords Ads in the Google SERPs | Main | What comes first, the traffic or the links? »

November 17, 2005

Is Yahoo Following Nofollow Links?

This topic came up on HighRankings recently. I ran some tests a while back that indicated none of the major search engines were following nofollowed links, so the topic piqued my interest.

Upon further investigation, it appears that nofollow links are showing up as backlinks in Yahoo.

As one of many examples, take the popular search engine blog at Search Engine Roundtable. A nofollow link on this page:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002595.html

shows up as a Yahoo backlink.

Likewise, here's one from John Battelle's blog.

Nofollowed comments over at Matt Cutt's blog are also showing up as backlinks in Yahoo. In fact, everywhere I looked this was the case for Yahoo, though not for MSN (I gave up on the Google link command years ago).

Of course, as I mention in the HighRankings thread, just because a page shows up in a link: command doesn't necessarily mean that it's sending link popularity. That's something that's much harder to test.

Like this article? Get lots more by subscribing to my feed.