SEO Test

I found this e-mail today from a guy who disaprooves with my seo research results:
Note: Some information has been modified to protect the anonymity of this person. I haven’t notified him yet that I’m going to publicize this conversation.

Hi X,

I got your email from the WHOIS record of the domain bubub.org ( http://whois.domaintools.com/bubub.org ).
I hope this email address works - Note to self: Set domain privacy protection. 

I have a comment regarding your REL=NOFOLLOW test at http://www.bubub.org/rel_nofollow_test.html

Your Google search for “www.bubub.org/BU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php” and that nothing gets returned is not enough to proof or dispoof that Google ignores the NOFOLLOW attribute sometimes.

1. none of the search engines return your test page, even the ones where it is known that they do ignore the NOFOLLOW attribute. I did the following searches:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.bubub.org%2FBU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.bubub.org%2FBU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=www.bubub.org%2FBU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php
http://www.ask.com/web?q=www.bubub.org%2FBU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php
Your test can’t be conclusive if not even the search engines that should have your page in the index don’t have it.

2. The claim is that Google ignores in some case the NOFOLLOW attribute and not that it ignores it always.

Interesting observation that the link with nofollow is included in the reporting data at Webmaster central though.
I removed your wrong reference from the Wikipedia article to nofollow. It was claiming to be a reference by Matt Cutts. However, I added it back as reference for the claim that NOFOLLOW links are reported by Google in the back-links reports at Google Webmaster Central.

Cheers!

So I reply: 

No, you shouldn’t of remove the reference from Wikipedia, it was supposed to be good for my site (just kidding, it was spam )

I must mention to you that www.bubub.org/BU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php has not been indexed when linked with the nofollow tag, even though all the other pages on my website are included in the index right now.

My personal thought is that the test is conclusive on a small scale, for pages linked internally only.

I somewhat agree with you, in real life situation this might not happen, but after all this test is not to prove the world, it’s rather for my own knwoledge.

Thanks for writing this e-mail, it’s always a pleasure to hearother people’s thoughts on my projects.

Regards,
X

I wasn’t expecting such a fast reply, with such a huge amount of text. This gentleman would make a good article writer. Whel he is, but at the wrong place - Wikipedia So here’s his quick reply on this seo debate:

Well, spam is subjective. Your intention was not entirely noble in this case
I am an active editor at Wikipedia and also an internet marketer (affiliate marketing, PPC, SEO etc.) See my user page here (removed the link because I haven’t asked for his permission to publish this conversation).
I want that the content is right and that claims are backed up as good as possible. It is sometimes hard to find anything useful to backup a fact that everybody in the industry knows, but nobody bothered to lay it out and proof it scientifically.
Then you get problems with the guys at Wikipedia who would like to delete all the content related to the subject, because they hate “marketing” and “commerce”… - My kind of buddy!

I will not remove the link how it is in there right now. It’s used for a different information, the back-link reports part. You might want to expand the content for this on your site and run a clean test and publish the results.
There are a bunch of other things in this industry where this was not done and would be helpful and actually earn a Wikipedia link without feeling bad about it.

Keep it up and don’t over do it. I have a bunch of articles on my watch list and revert spam that is really spam and just garbage. It’s a pain in the ass though and the guys who do nothing else than watching for spam are usually faster than I am.
That spam comes then back to bit when we work on real content, because it causes people to think that what you do is “spam” at first and you have to proof that it is not. That sucks.

Reflecting a little bit: as bubub.org will get more powerfull (backlinks, internal PR), the test page will push search engines to a point where they will skip the nofollow tag and snatch my page.
Great! Now I want you guys to write more feedback on my optimization tests!!!