rel="nofollow" test

Hypothesis:

Some people made recent claims that search engines like Google don't respect the rel nofollow tag. This SEO test page has been created to investigate what happens when linking this way. If you accidentally stumble across this test, please don't link to the following page: BU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7. If you must link to it, please use the following code: <a href="http://www.bubub.org/search_engine_visit_statistics.php" rel="nofollow">BU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7</a> - July 5, 2007 19:42

Observation Updates:

• July 31, 2007 15:40 - Almost one month into the testing process and still, the nofollow linked page did not get indexed by Google, MSN or Yahoo! Another thing worth mentioning is that Google Webmasters includes external links with nofollow as normal links.
• Sep 18, 2007 11:00 - The target hasn't been indexed. Googlebot has crawled my site several times, so I think it's safe to say that this experiment is over.

Test Results

September 18, 2007 11:14

1. Google does not follow the links with rel="nofollow" tag.
2. Yahoo does not follow the links with rel="nofollow" tag.
3. MSN does not have enough indexing power.

Aftermath

September 22, 2007 - The correctitude of my test results can no longer be verified. Due to recent public attention, links towards the target without the nofollow atribute have been accidentally created. I must admit that I'm responsabile for letting this mistake happen trough my lack of attention.

Here is the access line in the Apache server log that warned me there's something wrong:

66.249.73.21 - - [22/Sep/2007:01:16:28 -0400] "GET /BU8O0B0R6SE0T3S7.php HTTP/1.1" 200 960 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I'm deeply sorry for this mistake, but sooner or later this was going to happen. I'm planning on creating a new test, this time around with public access logs, but the circumstances will not be discussed here. Thank you for taking the time to read my test. I also have a new SEO Testing blog .

L.U. = September 22, 2007 21:29

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