> > Craig, I'm biting my fingers here to stop from typing "search and
> > though shalt find" as I've seen you reply a few times :)
> I'm guessing what is really holding you back is your seeing the
> difference between the two situations.
> On one hand, a polite request for confirmation, which doesn't preclude
> the possibility of additional information or references being known.
> And, on the other hand, a confrontational claim seemingly based on the
> assumption that absence of knowledge equals knowledge of absence which
> almost by definition precludes knowing of available information or
> references.
> Maybe we can just chalk it up to a difference in communication styles
> although you have to know that if one starts out on the offensive,
> someone invariably has to "lose". ;-)
> > Matt
> > explained the 'through a robots.txt'd page' a few times, including
> > here:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/.
> > There's an official statement on the webmaster central blog athttp://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-ways-for-you-...
> Right, it still seems "wacky" though. (I'm beginning to like that
> term!)
> > Essentially, yes, to link to page 3 from page 1, you run the link
> > through page 2 which is robots.txt'd out. It's not the same as
> > nofollow though, but it has the same effect of not passing PR to page
> > 3. The bummer is that it DOES pass PR to page 2, which ends up being
> > this black hole full of beautiful green PR.
> That's definitely wacky! :-()
> >.... (does that make it a
> > green hole, anyway I digress, but as you mentioned in your follow up
> > comment, you'd have to actually hit the link to page two with a
> > nofollow as well to make sure you don't pass all your PR into a big
> > hole - theoretically the page with the highest pagerank on your site
> > could be a disallowed page!).
> What I was thinking was actually to get rid of the intermediate page
> and just nofollow a link to a disallow'ed target page. That would
> seem to work for Google at least, I think.
> > Using nofollow on a link from the first
> > page to the third page will not pass PR to page 3. Now here is where
> > the real catch comes in because all search engines treat this blooming
> > attribute differently. Wikipedia has a good rundown on it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow.
> The Wikipedia article seems rather confusing at times.
> It states, "experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results".
> But, the SEO experiment(s) cited doesn't seem to prove much of
> anything as to whether or not Google follow'ed nofollow'ed links.
> About the only thing the cited experiment shows is that Google didn't
> index the experiment page for quite some time.
> I was thinking the Wiki article could be helped with a definition of
> "follow" but at the same time, what "follow" actually means is moot as
> it is implementation/search engine specific, the real questions are
> concerning indexing, SERPs and PageRank.
> So, saying someone "follows" something or not seems to add nothing
> except confusion.
> Either that or I am easily confused. :-()
> > As you can see, Matt's
> > statement further underlines the statements on that wikipedia page.
> Part of the problem is the Wiki page confused the hell out of me as it
> seems to say a lot about very little and cited experiments seem to not
> prove what they set out to or what they are claimed to.
> > So
> > from Google's point of view, the nofollow tag is a much easier and
> > better choice since you don't have the whole issue of PR 'leakage'.
> The PageRank "leakage" would seem a very important point, which is
> definitely one I had missed before.
> > I
> > think Google's is the most easy to understand considering the thing is
> > called "no follow", but I can see why Yahoo doesn't use it as such
> > because that is originally not how the attribute was intended.
> As far as a nofollow'ed link not passing ranking juice, it would seem
> that Yahoo does seem to follow the original intent more closely by not
> involving other issues, like indexing and related, showing up in
> SERPs, for which one should use nodinex of one really cared.
> I think it might be easily agreed though that "nofollow" might not
> have been the most appropriate name for this tag, at least without an
> agreed upon definition of what "follow" means.
> Maybe "nolinkjuice" would have been more fitting. :-()
> > Anyway,
> > if you want to use something that all search engines do the same with
> > I guess the option with a nofollowed link to a disallowed page which
> > then links on to the final target page is the only one that works.
> True, although all I am really concerned about is Google, for which a
> nofollow'ed link to a disallow'ed page, with no intermediate page,
> seems like it should work.
> It is not that I don't care about ranking in MSN or Yahoo but instead,
> even when I essentially wiped out a site's PageRank in an experiment,
> search results and indexed page counts for Yahoo and MSN didn't even
> seem to notice.
> > I was also surprised by the disallow'd pages still being able to show,
> > but I guess the explanation in the article made some sense in a wacky
> > kind of way.
> True, it is wacky but then again, the whole seemingly ill named
> nofollow thingy is wacky so what do you expect? :-()
> I think were it better named, it wouldn't be so strange but as it is,
> since it seems everyone has their own definition, it ends up with one
> having to try to thread a needle from ten feet away to keep everyone
> happy.
> > "If a bot can't crawl a page, how else could it know what is on the
> > page in order to decide what search terms to rank it for?"
> > The power of anchor text I'd guess.
> That would be my guess as well. We can already see pages that are in
> various SERPs purely due to linkage. But, doesn't that bring up the
> whole "Google bombing" thingy?
> Although that's a whole other subject and I don't want to get into
> here, if a page can show up in SERPs due to inbound anchor text alone,
> how is that not the equivalent of what one does when attempting
> "Google bombing"? Maybe there is a distinction somewhere but I seem
> to be missing it if there is.
> > These would have to be pretty
> > detailed search queries I'd say, ones that include a brandname plus
> > some specific terms that don't have many other results and especially
> > not other results from that site as these would outdo the disallowed
> > page easily.
> It depends on your definition of "detailed". ;-)
> I don't have any of my names on a given site at all yet due to
> external anchor text alone, the site shows up third for one of my
> names, out of almost 2 million available pages!
> I could agree though that a search on an actual name could be
> considered pretty detailed so maybe that isn't quite fair.
> But, even though I know a search for an allow'ed/index'ed/follow'ed
> page is different than a nofollow'ed page, I wonder if it makes any
> difference, once the page is actually in Google's index, one way or
> another.
> Either way, it's just plain wacky! :-()
> > You'd get the typical disallowed pages look in the index.
> "disallowed pages look", I've never seen that. Can you describe it or
> do you have an example of it?
> I seem to remember someone somewhere talking about it but I don't
> think I've ever seen what it ends up looking like in the SERPs.
> I know, I lead a sheltered life. :-()
> > I did think the article was funny with regards to ebay. They used to
> > not allow Google to crawl them and now they make up 25% of the Google
> > serps LOL
> :-()
> How about "The Search is mightier than the auction." or maybe, "no
> search tingy, no auction tingy". :-()
> >From a personal point of view I don't buy the "we'd look suboptimal if
> > we didn't return these results when someone searched for them"
> > reasoning as to why it was done this way.
> I would tend to agree, to an extent. Speaking about nofollow by
> itself, if I link to a page on my site without a nofollow link and you
> link to it from your site, with a nofollow link, I would hope it would
> still have a chance to show up in SERPs so from a "prior knowledge"
> point of view, I can understand.
> But, if only nofollow links exist, I would think it shouldn't ever
> show up although I don't think it possible to prove experimentally one
> way or another as it can actually be hard to get people to either not
> link at all to a given page or, have them link using the "correct"
> method to protect the experiment.
> Of course if we change that around and I nofollow'ed a link to a page
> on my site and you link to it from yours but don't nofollow it, Google
> indexing the page and returning it in SERPs based on your "vote" by
> linking to it without a nofollow would seem consistent with PageRank
> in general.
> > I know that I was trying to
> > do searches earlier today using our brandname + a unique phrase and
> > our site wasn't returned. It's the same when searching "John Chow" by
> > name. I agree that it makes Google look suboptimal, but they've known
> > about this for a while and aren't doing anything to make sure that
> > what the user is searching for gets returned - and these are allowed
> > pages. I've had to switch to Yahoo regularly of late due to cases like
> > this.
> Right, but at the same time, I search for any one of my names and they
> all lead to one of my sites.
> Thinking about that, could the difference between your and my case be
> that Google possibly sees your site in a similar light as John Chow's?
> Anyhoo, I've forgotten what we were talking about. :-()
> Oh yeah, I remember now, to be safe across all search engines and one
> needs 3 pages, source, intermediate and target but, for Google alone,
> it would seem that only the source and destination are needed with the
> source page link being nofollow'ed and the target page being
> disallow'ed, is that right?
> Craig
