Several times in the last few months I have run into the following scenario… I see a website that is ranking higher than me for a certain search term. When I analyze their backlinks I find they only have a few decent backlinks, and many backlinks from Yahoo Answers. These links are always in the answers to the question that was asked on Yahoo Answers, and the links always include the “nofollow” tag. Yahoo Answers includes the “nofollow” tag on all outoing links in their questions and answers.

According to Google no PR is passed when the “nofollow” tag is used.

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

In a Google blog post they also say this…

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

Could there be exceptions? If you’re Google and your goal is to provide the most relevant results, then you know that Yahoo Answers is going to be a quality source of reputable links. The same goes for Wikipedia, a human edited and highly credible (for the most part) set of links related to a certain topic.

It wouldn’t be hard at all for Google to make an exception in their algorithm to count “nofollow” tags from certain authority sites. In fact, when it comes to Yahoo Answers they could even count only the links in the winning answers. This would definitely increase their search results relevancy as those winning answers would usually be very high quality sites that are related to the question.

So I set out to see what other information there was about this topic and I found I wasn’t the only one that seems to think there is some incongruity when it comes to what Google says and what they do when it comes to nofollow links.

Wikipedia had an interesting bit…

Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).

I also found this very interesting blog post where someone also notices a conflict between what Google says about “nofollow” and what it they really do.

Only testing will tell if my suspicion about Yahoo Answers and the “nofollow” tag is true. Until then I’m never going to assume what anyone tells me is the truth without putting rational thought and experience through my own testing into it. Especially when it comes to SEO.

What do you think? Is this theory off the mark or have you experienced inconsistency with the nofollow tag also?