: Does a "nofollow" attribute on a link prevent URL discovery by search engines? I know that nofollow prevents link juice from being passed across a link. But if search engine robots discover

@Megan663

This article from 2006 explains an experiment where a new page was created an linked to only with nofollow.

It finds that Google:


Follows the link (crawls the URL with Googlebot)
Does not index the content of the page


The article also publishes results for MSN and Yahoo.

In 2009 Google significantly changed the way that nofollow works. Results regarding nofollow from before before the change would be good to re-test. A 2012 experiment on the discovery of a URL from a nofollow link found that the page does not get indexed (although it does not report on whether or not it got crawled.) [Credit: moobot from the comments.]

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@Kaufman445

Implementation of rel=nofollow on links will instruct a search engine not to follow the link. It won't, however (necessarily) prevent the linked page from getting indexed (purely as a URL) but it will prevent the contents at that URL from being indexed providing that there are no other followed links to the same destination elsewhere on the web.

This confirms what's already stated by both comments but also personal experience also confirms this is what happens also.

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