Yahoo and nofollow. There has been a lot of misconception about how Yahoo search treats nofollow attribute of links. Let me clear the topic for you. For those who don’t know what nofollow is, here is a short description.
Nofollow is an attribute which we can add to links which are not trusted so that our links does not count as a vote. Here is an example:
<a href=”http://spammer.example.com/”>buy now</a>
Becomes this:
<a href=”http://spammer.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>buy now</a>
Thus we prevent this link from acting as a vote to the above site. Using of nofollow attribute in links helps in cutting down comment spam in blogs.
Nofollow
So does Yahoo count nofollow links?
Yes and no. Yahoo does crawl nofollow links to discover new content. But it does not give any credit to the links in terms of search engine optimization and ranking. I repeat that Yahoo Slurp does crawl the links attributed with nofollow but does not give any credit or weight to them. So do not expect any help with respect to search engine rankings in Yahoo by using nofollow links.
But I can see the links in Yahoo Site Explorer?
Yes you can. But that just means that Yahoo knows that those links point to your site. Nothing more. As I said before, Yahoo Slurp does crawl and index nofollow attributed links. So there is no reason of them not showing up in the Yahoo Site Explorer.
How can I stop Yahoo from indexing certain links?
It’s easy. Instead of a nofollow attribute, you have to add a “noindex” attribute to your desired links. Just replace rel=”nofollow” by rel=”noindex” in the above example and you are done. You can also add rel=”noindex,nofollow” if you like. This will ensure that the search engines like Google, Yahoo do not crawl the links. In fact, it is advised to add noindex attributes to tags, categories, archives of blogs to avoid duplicate content issues. If you have a WordPress blog you can easily do that with the help of plug-ins like Platinum SEO or this one.
For those who are skeptical take a look at these links directly from Yahoo:
Link to this page
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