Nofollow test... are they really not followed?

I am currently running a test on nofollow links... it is more for MSN and yahoo than Google but we'll note all three.

The test is to see if any search engine will rank a site for a keyword with no competition(about 100 results) based on a few hundred(hopefully) nofollow links. I have seen evidence before that lead me to believe Yahoo does but up till now we haven't seen that in the experiment, maybe we need more links..


Want to participate?

Send me a PM, I would post the details but I want to make sure it is all done right and that the anchor text isn't used anywhere that could cause interference in the study.

For some this experiment may seem meaningless. I have some more meaningful studies coming up but they are a little more larger scale operations...

Meaningless, no; interesting, absolutely. I take it you've figured out a way to control for ranking for factors other than links, right?

There are no other factors that could in anyway influence it. The keyword used is not related to the site and is not mentioned on the site. There is nothing that could influence it other than nofollows being valued.

OK sounds very interesting, I would participate if it does not require too much time. Sending PM.

I am interested too - pm me

This sounds like a good and fairly interesting test.

After recently discovering with NavyCS's test that Yahoo does read meta tags as content it will be interesting to see how Yahoo and MSN handle the nofollow attribute.

Thanks.

The greatest value/impact is keeping your important pages out of supplemental result by "nofollow" irrelevant pages like contact us, policy and support pages, etc.

@fathom, how did you come to this conclusion, do you have any supporting evidence for this ?
I mean pages going to supplemental because of linking to irrelevant pages with regular links ?

I think you misread his reply. If you distribute your link juice to all the pages on your site each page gets a portion of it depending on your link structure. Placing nofollow to pages you don't need allows the good pages to get more of the available juice - prehaps enough to keep them from being supplemental.

Actually TONS - most websites that say "what happened?"

Tons of evidence to support it, actually one of my articles in queue is on this(I really need to finish them ) - Cutting down on pages that don't need to rank helps make the quality pages stand out...

I'm quite interested to know more about your results/evidence because the primary purpose of 'nofollow' is not to prevent internal PR distribution. I can't recall Google ever saying you should use it internally (I can vaguely recall Adam Lasnik perhaps mentioning it). Nofollow is to suggest 'I don't vouch for this link'. A result from that purpose if no PR is passed along. So do you want to 'not vouch' for your own internal links?


Having said that the tests I've done are inconclusive, meaning they have no impact on rankings.....so far as I can see (if used internally).

Edit: Here is a discussion from a while back with some of MC's comments. highrankings

Everything I've read though so far suggests internal use is pretty cloudy.

"Tons of evidence to support it" does not actually help me see the evidence !!!
Any directions or hints or where to find such evidence ?