How Google & Yahoo handle the link condom

Loren Baker over at SEJ got a few official statements on use and abuse of the rel-nofollow microformat by the major players: How Google, Yahoo & Ask treat NoFollow'ed links. Great job, thanks!

Ask doesn't "officially" support nofollow, whatever that means. Loren didn't ask MSN, probably because he didn't expect that they've even noticed that they officially support nofollow since 2005, same procedure with sitemaps by the way. Yahoo implemented it along the specs, and Google stepped way over the line the norm sets. So here is the difference:

1. Do you follow a nofollow'ed link?
Google: No (longer)
Yahoo: Yes

2. Do you index the linked page following a nofollow'ed link?
Google: Obsolete, see 1.
Yahoo: Yes

3. Does your ranking algos factor in reputation, anchor/alt/title text or whichever link love sourced from a nofollow'ed link?
Google: Obsolete, see 1.
Yahoo: No

4. Do you show nofollow'ed links in reverse citation results?
Google: Yes (in link: searches by accident, in Webmaster Central if the source page didn't make it into the supplemental index)
Yahoo: Yes (Site Explorer)

Q&A#4 is made up but accurate. I think it's safe to assume that MSN handles the link condom like Yahoo. (Update: As Loren clarifies in the comments, he asked MSN search but they didn't answer in a timely fashion.)

And here's a remarkable statement from Google's search evangelist Adam Lasnik, who may like nofollow or not:

On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments ... we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow ... expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.

Bravo!


Related link: rel="nofollow" Google, Yahoo and MSN

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