Maybe since the new “Caffeine” engine crawls social networks posts (which are completely nofollow areas) it gives nofollow a lower ranking (say, 10 nofollow links = 1 dofollow one): if googlebot is really nofollow blind, it won’t work at all.

Anyway i’m no SEO guru, just guessing.

Thanks for your thoughts, it really helped me to put the things simple in my mind but still I feel that, at Google, things are not as simple as it looks. Based on my experience, I feel that, there is something which is unclear as far as links are concerned. Recently, Google has announced in Webmaster forum that, any content you post which helps people to gain knowledge or help them to resolve their queries can be counted as Vote to your content. (Now Does it mean that, posting in Yahoo answers which is NO FOLLOW will be counted as VOTE to my URL ? ). Secondly, If there is NO VOTE then Why Google takes pain to show those links which has no effect on my websites as it has no meaning for me. Google crawlers have always been smart & share the data by keeping webmaster interest so, why they show the links which has no value ? & if they have to then it should be like Yahoo who shows all the links unbiased.

So, I feel that, things are not as simple as it looks or shown by the Google but there is something which we don’t know yet. But, anyways, this kind of sharing will help us to gain more understanding about the trends in the industry. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts & helping readers to make things more simple.

NoFollow is not a standard HTML attribute and designed by Google itself to suit the need of their algorithm.

It means, It is not necessary that it will be respected by Yahoo and other search engines too. That can be a reason you can see more backlinks in Yahoo as compared to Google.

What is NOFOLLOW?

NoFollow doesn’t means the Google both will not crawl it. It will crawl it and will show you as a backlink but to respect you, their algorithm will not count it as a vote to that website. That’s it.

Same applies for Internal Links too. If you are linking to an inner page, they will crawl the link, may show it as a backlink for that page but it will not consider as a vote.

Backlinks also depends on other things too like the Robots.txt and the META description of the targeted and the page which is giving links. If there is relevant match, you may see as a back links.

SO, don’t mix backlink as VOTE. NOFOLLOW means no VOTE and that will have to impact on PR but it will crawl it, will give backlinks too. So, don’t think that more backlinks means higher PR.

I hope your confusion will be clear.

Thanks for quick input. Yup, agreed, but over the years, Google has changed the way they evaluates the backlinks. So, there is a difference when earlier you see the backlinks in you WT & when you see now. As per my experience, Backlinks still pay very important role to sustain your position in Google SERP. Again, you are right .EDU links show up in webmaster (same way as other NOFOLLOW links appear) but whats the value of those backlinks thats the biggest query I have. Being a SEO, its very very important for me to analyze the way Google look & evaluate these links. You will be surprised if you look at this article of SEO MOZ. They conducted a test by setting up 12 independent sites on different IPs just to study the way Google treats the backlinks & “NOFOLLOW” attributes. Again thanks for the input, it helps me to think in more deep of these discussion.

Time to learn from experience only. Every website behaves differently when we start SEO strategy on it, and needs to keep changing it as its behavior.

Giving you one more example of no-follow.

People keep talking about .edu links but mostly all re no-follow and still .edu links can be bought. And SEO people do hard work to find it. And you will get .edu link in webmaster tool also.

I hope this little contribution help in understanding no-follow attribute. Link is a Link dont think much abt do follow / no follow