How rel=nofollow Works

The article is a bit wrong. nofollow does not mean that the crawlers must not follow the link, but means that the ranking algorithms must not consider the link for the ranking as the link could be dubious or spam.<p>As such, the relationship between the page linked and the page linking is not to be affected by the link. And <i>this</i> is what makes the links not surfacing.<p>Basically, the current Twitter HTML says: We have no outbound links.

The cited Danny Sullivan article has a little of his interview with Eric Schmidt:<p>sullivan&#62; I countered that Google seemed to have all the permission it needed, in that they’re not blocked from crawling pages.<p>schmidt&#62;“That’s your opinion,” Schmidt said, then joked: “If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.”<p>sullivan&#62; I pushed back that both have effectively given those letters since their robots.txt files — a method of blocking search engines — weren’t telling Google to go away.<p>Well, why stop there? Why shouldn't Google ignore the robots.txt file in its search for shareable nuggets for its search results, which they are equally not "blocked" from using? The answer for both rel=nofollow and robots.txt is that Google has explicitly promised webmasters that it will not do this. Sullivan knows this: this is bad journalism. I'd be curious to see more of the transcript of the interview.

But, MG Siegler is correct, is he not, that google have chosen not to link to artists twitter pages alongside their G+ pages, and that this could easily been seen as anti-competitive.<p>e.g. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?&#38;q=music" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?&#38;q=music</a>

This guy completely misread MG Siegler. MG's point is rel=nofollow has nothing to do with the twitter profile pages that google is refusing to include in their people &#38; places feature. Nothing to do with outbound links.<p>This enitre debate over rel=nofollow is a red herring.

I'm amazed really by how much FUD has be4en spread around by Twitter, and most reports of the story. This article clears it up perfectly.

FWIW, bingbot basically DDOS'ed our site a few months ago by crawling links that were labeled nofollow/noindex in the hrefs. Adding a rule to robots.txt fixed the problem.

"The hubbub is centered around a complaint by Twitter that links shared on Twitter are not surfacing in the search results."<p>I think this mischaracterizes this complaint. I don't think anyone is complaining that the LINKS themselves aren't surfacing. That complaint would imply that their ought to be some influence between links on Twitter and the search rank of those linked pages. And I don't think anyone wants to see spammy tweets on Twitter altering skewing search ranking.<p>Rather the complaint is that recommendations from Twitter are not APPEARING in the search results. And to that point: Why is it difficult for Google to index the fact that someone linked to a site (whether it be rel=nowfollow or not)? Why does this information need to be coupled with the passing of page rank?

I don't think this is what they're complaining about. Twitter is saying why are they not linking to the @wwe Twitter account in the new social recommendations like the Google+ links to @wwe. They're not talking about links outbound of Twitter, rather links inbound to twitter, like the @wwe twitter or Facebook account pages.

What would happen if twitter removed rel="nofollow"? Couldn't that open the possibility for more spam on twitter? I tend to agree with Google here, but maybe when it comes to social recommendation, Twitter could be recognized as special and specific algorithms could be written to figure out the worth of a recommendation.

Brilliant article. I was starting to doubt Google for a minute, but this clears it up concisely.

There seems to be some confusion about the different kinds of nofollow.<p>&#60;a rel="nofollow"...&#62; Means not to follow the link to which the nofollow belongs. It may still be indexed, however, if the page is found by a either an internal or external followed link.<p>The &#60;meta name="robots" content="nofollow"&#62; does not follow/crawl to any of the links on the page. These pages may be indexed, however if they are reached by either an internal or external followed link<p>To keep the page out of the index, "noindex" should be applied to the meta tag of the page that is to be removed from the index.<p>Further, a Robots.txt /disallow does not remove pages from the index. A noindex must be used on the page to remove it from the index. Or a request via Google's Webmaster Tools.<p>That said, it seems feasible that if Google wanted to, they could parse the external links from a Twitter stream without actually following them. This wouldn't necessitate Twitter removing nofollow from their links.

Twitter does in fact implement rel=nofollow to external links on their site but this does not mean content (especially profiles) can not be indexed. Mentioning Twitter’s use of rel=nofollow is a definite red herring.

Personally I think it's dumb for Twitter to nofollow it's outbound links. If I were them I would let the links be followed and then let Google come up with an algorithm on how to rank the links from Twitter.

Can someone please explain to me what nofollow has to do with Google indexing or displaying tweets in their serps. It's like saying Google discourages pages which may contain relevant/important information on the topic a user may be looking for because it contains nofollow links. What am i missing here?

What have outbound links to do with this at all? Many tweets can and do have zero links. I don't see how that's relevant to this conversation where the topic is about searching the tweets themselves, which has nothing whatsoever to do with outbound links from those tweets.

(I am new to this debate and so may be way off, but)<p>As far I understand, even this article is not very clear. It says:<p><i>Google is simply complying with Twitter.com’s directive to not follow outbound links in tweets it crawls, and the consequence is that there will never be ”… shared this on Twitter” in the search results.</i><p>Wrong.<p>You see, when I share some random link in my blog and then you search for that topic, Google will not say "niyazpk shared this in ...." in the search result. Why? Because Google probably considers shares from a few trusted sites/partners only.<p>Let us read Google's explanation again:<p><i>We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (<a href="http://goo.gl/chKwi" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/chKwi</a>), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.</i><p>And this quote from Google[1]:<p><i>Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.</i><p>It is pretty clear what happened. Twitter did not renew the agreement with Google and Google stopped considering Twitter as a source for the "shared on" snippet. The "no-follow" attribute has nothing to do with except that it work exactly like it works for any other site.<p>[1] <a href="http://searchengineland.com/as-deal-with-twitter-expires-google-realtime-search-goes-offline-84175" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/as-deal-with-twitter-expires-goo...</a>