Google and Twitter Should Say No to Nofollow

[djbaxter]

Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!
By Andy Beal
Fri, 03/06/2009

What was initially sold by Google as a means to stop our “Google Juice” being shared with sites we don’t trust, is now so pervasive, it’s preventing search engines from tapping into the hundreds of newly minted web pages, video streams, images, and blog posts that are shared each day on sites such as Twitter. With the nofollow tag added to every single link shared in Twitter, Google’s spider–even if it could keep up with Twitter’s flow of content–is strictly forbidden from following those links.

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If after 10+ years Google can’t tell a spam site from a legitimate one, then maybe we need a better search engine!

...more

 

[DJMC]

Andy Beal is mistaken........Google crawls ALL RELEVANT LINKS, even the "no follow".

• They crawl no-follow links for purposes of comparing KW & relevancy
• "What The Googlebot Sees" : GWT shows no-follow links in their External Link count
• Anchor Text from no-follow links goes into relevancy & content algorithm computation. Only Page Rank is ignored!

I see tons of No Follow links counted at GWT.
FOR EXAMPLE: "Hubspot" has dozens of counted links. these links were crawled and spidered, and the anchor text is counted in "What The Google Bot Sees"