Google ignoring NoFollow?
NoFollow is an attribute of the HTML anchor tag created by Google to indicate that a link is not trusted, and shouldn’t be considered for SEO ranking purposes. It is known by many as a link condom, and its usage is controversial, to say the least.
There are now discussions at SEO Black Hat and The V7N Network intimating that Google may not be following its own rules with NoFollow. The theory, originally proposed by Link Building Blog, is that in some cases, NoFollow’ed links may still pass link juice.
While the evidence presented so far is less than absolute, I believe this is likely to be true. Google probably views the NoFollow as a vote against the link, but many other factors might cause the link to be counted anyways. A case for this can be made because of the NoFollow’ed links at Wikipedia. It’s unlikely that Google would ignore links from such an authoritative site.
In addition, it’s naive to think that Google would leave the determination of a link’s value entirely up to webmasters. That’s what NoFollow as originally created would do.
