How rel=nofollow Works
luigimontanez.com
How rel=nofollow Works
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Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#2I'm amazed really by how much FUD has be4en spread around by Twitter, and most reports of the story. This article clears it up perfectly.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#3The cited Danny Sullivan article has a little of his interview with Eric Schmidt:
sullivan> I countered that Google seemed to have all the permission it needed, in that they’re not blocked from crawling pages.
schmidt>“That’s your opinion,” Schmidt said, then joked: “If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.”
sullivan> I pushed back that both have effectively given those letters since their robots.txt files — a method of blocking search engines — weren’t telling Google to go away.
Well, why stop there? Why shouldn't Google ignore the robots.txt file in its search for shareable nuggets for its search results, which they are equally not "blocked" from using? The answer for both rel=nofollow and robots.txt is that Google has explicitly promised webmasters that it will not do this. Sullivan knows this: this is bad journalism. I'd be curious to see more of the transcript of the interview.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#4The article is a bit wrong. nofollow does not mean that the crawlers must not follow the link, but means that the ranking algorithms must not consider the link for the ranking as the link could be dubious or spam.
As such, the relationship between the page linked and the page linking is not to be affected by the link. And this is what makes the links not surfacing.
Basically, the current Twitter HTML says: We have no outbound links.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#5The article is a bit wrong. nofollow does not mean that the crawlers must not follow the link, but means that the ranking algorithms must not consider the link for the ranking as the link could be dubious or spam. As such, the relationship between the page linked and the page linking is not to be affected by the link. And this is what makes the links not surfacing. Basically, the current Twitter HTML says: We have no…
Google has said that it won't add a URL to its index of URLs to crawl as a result of seeing the URL in a rel=nofollow href [1]. This is over and above not weighting the link if the URL does otherwise make it onto its to crawl list.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-prot...
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#6But, MG Siegler is correct, is he not, that google have chosen not to link to artists twitter pages alongside their G+ pages, and that this could easily been seen as anti-competitive.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#7But, MG Siegler is correct, is he not, that google have chosen not to link to artists twitter pages alongside their G+ pages, and that this could easily been seen as anti-competitive. e.g. https://www.google.com/search?&q=music
That's a new sidebar feature that goes where ads have traditionally gone. Google has decided to literally promote G+ over ads, which is a story in itself, but a totally different one.
It doesn't change the search results in the main column.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#8The article is a bit wrong. nofollow does not mean that the crawlers must not follow the link, but means that the ranking algorithms must not consider the link for the ranking as the link could be dubious or spam. As such, the relationship between the page linked and the page linking is not to be affected by the link. And this is what makes the links not surfacing. Basically, the current Twitter HTML says: We have no…
Google has said that it won't add a URL to its index of URLs to crawl as a result of seeing the URL in a rel=nofollow href [1]. This is over and above not weighting the link if the URL does otherwise make it onto its to crawl list. [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-prot...
Sure, but the probability of having an URL shared only through a tweet is zero. Google is insanely efficient at finding new URLs. So, it will find it anyway, but it will not be shown to you as "shared by your friend John" because of the nofollow.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#9(I am new to this debate and so may be way off, but)
As far I understand, even this article is not very clear. It says:
Google is simply complying with Twitter.com’s directive to not follow outbound links in tweets it crawls, and the consequence is that there will never be ”… shared this on Twitter” in the search results.
Wrong.
You see, when I share some random link in my blog and then you search for that topic, Google will not say "niyazpk shared this in ...." in the search result. Why? Because Google probably considers shares from a few trusted sites/partners only.
Let us read Google's explanation again:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
And this quote from Google[1]:
Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.
It is pretty clear what happened. Twitter did not renew the agreement with Google and Google stopped considering Twitter as a source for the "shared on" snippet. The "no-follow" attribute has nothing to do with except that it work exactly like it works for any other site.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/as-deal-with-twitter-expires-goo...
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#10The article is a bit wrong. nofollow does not mean that the crawlers must not follow the link, but means that the ranking algorithms must not consider the link for the ranking as the link could be dubious or spam. As such, the relationship between the page linked and the page linking is not to be affected by the link. And this is what makes the links not surfacing. Basically, the current Twitter HTML says: We have no…
Google has said that it won't add a URL to its index of URLs to crawl as a result of seeing the URL in a rel=nofollow href [1]. This is over and above not weighting the link if the URL does otherwise make it onto its to crawl list. [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-prot...
The post you're linking is discussing the META tag version of nofollow, not the hyperlink rel attribute which is detailed here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-sp...
This article doesn't say explicitly that it won't follow those links and I would suggest it often will as comments are a rich source of pages to index. The nofollow on a link like this just indicates that the page owner can't vouch for the quality of the linked page (e.g. user submitted link) and therefore doesn't want to pass pagerank to it.
Edit: it's also implied in the parent's link that the META tag only prevents the following of links to pages within your site. This sounds reasonable as who are you to tell Google they can't index a third party domain?