Does Google Track No Follow Links?

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Does Google Track No Follow Links?

Experiment – ​​no follow links

The use of the label rel="nofollow" has been the subject of heated debate online and has brought to light a number of contrasting opinions put forward by leading SEO experts. Official Google guidelines around its use say:

How does Google process “nofollow” links?

In general terms, Google does not follow these links, that is, no transfer PageRank nor the link text through them. Basically, nofollow causes Google to not include the specified links in the overall web graph. However, the corresponding pages may still appear in the index if other sites link to them and do not use nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a sitemap. Also, it's worth noting that other search engines may use the nofollow value slightly differently.

In the past, the nofollow tag had primarily been promoted by Google as a way to prevent PageRank or other link authority that is passed through links and is usually recommended for when you don't necessarily trust the destination of the link, or a paid link. However, many sites use the rel="nofollow" tag as a way to moderate internal tracking budget and ensure that the highest performing landing pages are crawled with the highest priority (for example, when using faceted navigation). This seems reasonable, however this recent post by Rand Fishkin on Moz suggests that this practice is not correct and will not prevent search engines from actually physically crawling the link.

“And the nofollow tag, which lives on an individual link on a page. It doesn't tell search engines where to crawl or where not to. All it says is whether you editorially give permission to a page being linked and whether you want to pass PageRank and link equity metrics to that page.

The nofollow tag, generally speaking, is not particularly useful for controlling robots or maintaining indexing.”

Ok, now I'm confused... There's Google telling us one thing, but one of the industry's leading experts is also telling us another. So, in order to get to the bottom of this debate, we decided to try it for ourselves! Read on to find out what our tests revealed.

THEORY OF PROOF

Here at Search Laboratory we have our own portfolio of test domains, operating in highly controlled scenarios where we can run tests on different aspects of SEO theory in order to present only the best, proven recommendations to our clients. Here, we have tried to answer the question – Does Google track no follow links?

TEST REQUIREMENTS

  • 2 unused test domains
  • Set of file accesses for each domain

TESTING PROCESS

1.- We make sure that both sites are blocking all search engine crawlers in the robots.txt file before starting the test. We don't want any bot crawling the sites and invalidating our study before we even start.

2.- Establish three pages on each site – a home page, a second page (in this case we call it /page-b/), and a third page (/page-c/)

3.- We establish a link from the home page to / page-b / and add the rel = “nofollow” tag.

4.- We establish a link from the main page to /pagina-c/ without the rel="nofollow" tag (we did this to ensure that Google was actually crawling the sites and not just ignoring them completely!)

5.- We unblock the sites from search engine crawlers in the robots.txt file and use the “Fetch as Google” tool in the Google Search console. We select 'Crawl only this URL' to ensure that Google can find the nofollow link naturally and not using help:

nofollow-links

6.- We monitor Google bot activity on sites that use access log files.

TEST RESULTS

We have been running this test for over a month (July 20, 2015) and had access to a lot of login activity by Googlebot. In July we saw the following activity at both of our sites:

Site 1

URL Traces 
robots.txt

57

Homepage

20

/page-b/

0

/page-c/

4

 

Site 2

URL Traces
robots.txt

40

Homepage

10

/page-b/

0

/page-c/

3

We were still skeptical that Google might not have detected the link to /page-b/, so we went back to Search Console to give it a nudge.

nofollow-links-2

And the most recent data (taken August 24, 2015) shows the following crawling activity by Googlebot:

Site 1

URL Traces 
robots.txt

113

Homepage

69

/page-b/

0

/page-c/

8

Site 2 

 

URL Traces 
robots.txt

75

Homepage

39

/page-b/

0

/page-c/

4

 

There is still absolutely no crawling activity from Google on our nofollow link! Despite Google found our site 113 times and 75 times, respectively, crawling our website 69 times and 39 times, and our link to /page-c/ a handful of times on each site, we saw zero hits to /page-b/, which was only accessible through that nofollow link on our website.

CONCLUSION OF THE TEST

Despite this test being run on a small scale (only two test sites and two linked pages per site), we can still draw a solid conclusion from this data and deduce that Google was honoring the rel="nofollow" tag. ” in our link and not by crawling the linked page. Therefore, it is our opinion, based on this study, no follow links, and that these tags can be used to control crawl budget and indexing maintenance.

Source: Search Laboratory