Imagine for a moment that you've spent the last three hours watching your boss imbibe, and that he (or she) is shamelessly sloshed. Just as things are really getting comfortable, your boss drops this little jewel of information into your lap:

"Johnson in accounting is close to getting fired. I think he does a terrible job, and I would have fired him last week if the HR manager...never mind."

Let's also pretend for just a minute that "Johnson" is actually a really good friend. When you sober up and see Johnson at work tomorrow, what will you do? If you warn your friend, you might embarrass yourself. After all, your boss was drunk - what if his comments were just meaningless boasting? Are you really going to put the fear of termination in your co-worker based on these facts? Not to mention that if you warn your friend you might also endanger your relationship with your boss. If he finds out you tipped off Johnson, that might be enough to make sure you two never go drinking again...or worse. To make your life just a little more complicated, here's the final piece of the puzzle: Your boss finds you the next morning and tells you, "Don't worry about anything I said last night - no one is getting fired." What to do?

In the real world, very few of us would make our decision based on this single chain of events. Instead, we would think carefully about all the other comments our boss has made, our relationships with these people, who we can trust, etc., and then we would decide how to act. I think that this is exactly what Google is doing when it comes to valuing links with the "nofollow" tag. Google understands that when a webmaster says, "Hey, don't pay attention to this link - it's not a link worth following," that might not be the truth. Following a nofollow link makes perfect sense in my eyes - how else could Google hope to index the entire web so quickly? Surely their bots are following every link, nofollow or not. However, whether or not Google will place a value on the nofollow link can't simply be based on what a webmaster tells them to do.

Just like your boss said, "I was just drunk when I was talking about Johnson," I think Google understands that webmasters are attempting to manipulate search results with the nofollow tag. Some websites, like Wikipedia, are boldly telling Google that each and every outbound link is "drunk talk." Sure, and my dog is a PHP genius. Most likely, Google is looking at the exact same criteria they use to rank a website to determine the value of a nofollow link. Is the link that Google isn't supposed to follow leading to a trustworthy website? Is the content at the end of the nofollow link relevant? Does this nofollow link point to a website with a balanced link portfolio? The answers to these questions would go a long way toward determining the true value of a nofollow link.

Ask yourself this one question, why wouldn't Google (and Yahoo! and Ask and MSN) be weighting nofollow links? Only a foolish search engine would trust a webmaster at their word. Don't get me wrong – I realize that most nofollow links aren't weighted by the search engines. While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and state the obvious and say that “follow” links are more valuable than “nofollow” links. Still, I've seen some results from my own work that highly-relevant nofollow links are boosting search results.

The bottom line for me: Search engines aren't going to take webmasters at their word. "Nofollow" isn't a rule - it's just a guide. Search engine bots and algorithms will do what they want, because they have the data and tools to determine which "nofollow" links are valuable. In other words, "Johnson, get your resume ready."


Jason Lancaster is a Denver search engine expert.