Do Nofollow Links Count?
Generally we say that nofollow links don’t count, but Ben
Fisher actually found that they do help with ranking based on a small experiment he ran. He did an interesting study where he wrote on the SpiderMan
3 game and then commented on other related blogs that linked back to his SpiderMan 3 post. The unique thing about the link was that it contained the anchor text "piderMan 3" and contained a nofollow, but within a short period of time his site ranked on the first page of Google for piderMan 3 Xbox and other terms.
If you look at the image above it shows that there are 224 results for "piderMan 3 Xbox". This means that it should be fairly easy to rank for the term, but the actual blog post that ranks for the term doesn’t have the word piderMan anywhere within the content. The only reason I think it ranks is because the nofollow link contained the anchor text "piderMan".
I am not sure if the way Google looks at nofollows is currently messed up on their end or if they actually do count them, but based on this experiment it seems that they can help with rankings. What do you think?
