The truth about the rel=nofollow attribute and PageRank

There have been quite a lot of discussions recently in some prominent forums about whether or not the rel=nofollow attribute or “NoFollow links” as they are commonly referred to passes PageRank as far as Google is concerned.

The problem with many public forums is that opinions are a dime a dozen and even the village idiot wants other people to think he is some kind of online marketing expert…

Don’t get me wrong, I have picked up very valuable information over the years on public forums… Unfortunately there is also a lot of misleading and downright false information that some people dish out in forums. I sincerely believe that the majority of these folks have good intentions but base their comments on incorrect assumptions and often hearsay.

If they hear something often enough it becomes the gospel truth in their eyes!

Ok, enough with the rant… Let’s get to the facts.

Fact: “NoFollow links” do not pass PageRank.

This issue was once again addressed by Matt Cutts of Google on the 15th June 2009.

According to Matt Cutts “in Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext.”

He continues by saying…

“Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.”

Source: PageRank Sculpting

Are “NoFollow” backlinks worthless?

As far as getting “link juice” or PageRank is concerned, yes!

But, that does not mean that Google doesn’t follow these links… Google does!

One of the best ways to get your site or new content indexed is to get a backlink from a high PageRank site. It does not matter if the link is NoFollow.

The second reason why NoFollow backlinks are not worthless, is traffic. Many popular (and therefore high traffic sites) have the rel=nofollow attribute but can provide you with a lot of traffic.

Thirdly, Google can distinguish between “natural” and “unnatural” links. In my opinion, having both DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks are more natural than only having DoFollow backlinks from high PageRank sites.

Source: Google-friendly sites

So, although NoFollow backlinks don’t pass PageRank and will not help your site to rank higher in Google’s search results they can still be beneficial in other ways.

All the best,

Francois du Toit