Paid links and the nofollow have been talked about TONS lately, its an on-going battle between paid link sellers and the big bad search engines. The paid text link war looks to be a losing one for us sellers, I have recently took off all of my paid links on all of my websites. Infact, today should be the very last day for Text Link Ads, I have emailed them and they are taking me out of there system. Like I said before, the few hundred dollars isn’t worth the stress and de-ranking of my beautiful websites.
But I will let other bloggers keep you guys updated on the politics of the text link wars. I will, however, test the nofollow to see if it even works. With the help of a few of my buddies.
I want to see if google, yahoo, and msn really do not pass any weight to websites that are linked with the nofollow attribute. Google stance on this is that if you link a website with nofollow, than the website will not get crawled at all.
However, my tests have always showed that google still does pass weight to websites that are linked with the nofollow attribute. Wikipedia links help so much 
But I wanted to test this myself, I have tested this before, but that was a while ago. So I will test it again and see what the result will be this time. This test will be a public test, I will show you guys the website and some of the websites that are linking to the website. I will also answer any questions you guys have about this test in the comments, to make it fair to everyone.
I bought the domain and made the website yesterday, its hosted on this server and uses dnsmadeeasy.com for the name servers. I used godaddy to purchase the domain. I will link to the website from about 10-12 difference websites, so far I have about 6-7. Half are mine, and half are my buddies Wes. Which I would like to thank again for his help on this test.
later today I will add the link to 2 of my sites and then get another 2 websites from my buddies online. My prediction is that it will be indexed within 3 days.
I will show you the website as soon as its indexed. The reason being is because I don’t anyone to tamper with the results. I will give you a hint though, its a sitepoint members name 
If you have any questions or suggestions please ask in the comments, also If you have any websites that get decent spider activity and would like to help with this test than please contact me. Thanks everyone.
Follow me on my journey of success and failures, it should be a fun ride.... Again, here is the link for the RSS feed.
Random Posts
Comments are Dofollow! My thanks to you for contributing to the discussion
13 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Great idea. I have been waiting for someone knowledgable to do a test like that ever since I saw Eli making some cryptic comment about nofollow a while back. I will follow your proceedings with great interest.
Thanks, I think I know how the test will end up. But we will see.
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with Jon, links with that attribute are most likely being taken into consideration by other search engines, but, as far as G is concerned, I doubt that they place much weight on them (if they would then, let’s face it, why all the drama with websites such as TC?).
Alan Johnson
Nofollow does seem to carry some weight. I’m sure it carries far less weight than an actual link. Here’s my guess on it. Context of the link is counted. I’ve seen the context of my nofollow links count on sites. I believe that weight or PageRank might not flow through. So you my help by determing the relevance of a web site through nofollow, but probably won’t increase it’s popularity. Just my guess from what I’ve seen in the past few months.
Nice to see some experiments with text links… I had also some domains having paid links which went from PR5 to PR0 and it was PR5 for almost 2 years before I put 3 TLA links and purchased few paid links to that site.
Paul, I’d say we are pretty much on the same page with this one, I agree that nofollow definitely carries weight but am just as certain that, for example, it does not pass any PR.
Alan Johnson
hehe, cool jon
I also thought this from the beginning
Great post , thank you
Happy New Year ,& all the best,
Tracy Ho
wisdomgettingloaded
I believe it carries weight, not sure on the pretty page rank. This test is to see if it passes weight.
Looking forward to seeing the results.
I really think it will pass weight to the site, page rank I don’t think so though but that would be awhile till you’d find that out.
The importance of PR is debatable nowadays anyway and I wouldn’t be surprised to see G drop it altogether in the forseeable future.
Alan Johnson
The official claim is that links with the rel=nofollow attribute do not influence the search engine rankings of the target page. In addition to Google, Yahoo and MSN also support the rel=nofollow attribute.
i think it helps indexing