: Do all search engines obey nofollow rel attribute on hyperlinks I have been informed that search engine support is inconsistent for the rel attribute with the 'nofollow' value. Is this the case.

@Bryan171

From my experience, BingBot does follow links despite them having a nofollow attribute. I can see it currently in our logs: thousands of requests per day for pages that are linked using nofollow hyperlinks. I did check the IPs as well as user-agent and they seem to be legit requests from bingbot.

Whether or not Bing then uses this for anything (indexing, ranking...) I don't know, but I can confirm it does follow the links.

As per other search engines, I don't have a blanket answer to cover all, but I can say I'm only seeing this from by Bing and (to a smaller extent) Yandex. The rest don't seem to be following the links, although not to an extent that makes me notice it.

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@Sarah324

All of the major search engines have acknowledged support for rel="nofollow"

From Wikipedia:


While all engines that use the
nofollow value exclude links that use
it from their ranking calculation, the
details about the exact interpretation
of it vary from search engine to
search engine.

Google states that their engine takes
"nofollow" literally and does not
"follow" the link at all. However,
experiments conducted by SEOs show
conflicting results. These studies
reveal that Google does follow the
link, but does not index the linked-to
page, unless it was in Google's index
already for other reasons (such as
other, non-nofollow links that point
to the page).

Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it
from their ranking calculation.

Bing respects "nofollow" as regards
not counting the link in their
ranking, but it is not proven whether
or not Bing follows the link.

Ask.com also respects the attribute.

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