What else can we expect from ghoul gull.

I liked the article.  Good work, now prove to me that they actually do something other than use it for discovery.  Ie will use anchor text that is no-follow to get a ranking in Google.  Can't wait for part 2.

Good research really works.

Sorry, I have some issues here.

"From recent competitive analysis of other sites it seemed strange that some sites where ranking incredibly well even though these sites had a lot of their links coming in to them that contained the No-Follow attribute."

OK, so that suggests that Google is giving credit to these links. That it is allowing them to flow PageRank to other pages. How do we then prove or disprove this?

Jaamit links to a subdomain off of three blogs, but nowhere else. This proves that links are being followed, which to his earlier explanation, means he thinks the links are giving credit. In reality:

1) Putting the links to the subdomains in public means they might be exposed without the nofollow attribute in other ways, such as perhaps through scraper sites. Google might have found the pages that way.

2) Google might also find the subdomains in other ways, such as through the Google Toolbar (if that was running), doing DNS queries or other options.

3) At best, it shows that Google followed the links to INDEX the subdomains. That's entirely different than the links passing along link credit to those domains.

Danny I must debate the fact of using the Google toolbar. I specifically stated in the blog that I did not, in any way leave any way for that link to be traced back. I did not use an alexa or a google toolbar, nor did I use any other toolbars for that matter. I used a fresh install of opera to check on and test the site so that it would not be picked up by Google.Also the 3 blogs that I left comments on were not scraped. I checked this by using copying and pasting the title tags into google from the blogs. The only query that these blogs returned were the blog itself. I also copied and pasted the word of my comments from all 3 of these blogs and that did not turn out any results either. So as far as I can see the sites weren't scraped.also I think you confused one of my commenters with me. I am the one who ran these tests and wrote the blog post. My name is Joseph Alvini not Jaamit :) but I can see that it was very easy to get confused because of the comment that he made.Thanks for the comment but I really feel that I covered all of the bases with this test.

Also Danny I dont feel like I went out on a whim with writing this blog post. In my last article about Google Trustrank you definately had the right to flame me on that because I went out on a whim. But I really feel like I covered all of my bases with this one. Again thanks for the comment. It is always great to have someone of your caliber paying attention to my work

Danny can you show evidence of that being the case?

If you look at the screen shots there is no google toolbar, it's not on a sitemap.  I could be wrong but, I never heard of Google going out doing sam spade type stuff to find & index... It's something that it has looked it to establish if the site is authentic, ie if it's actually BofA or something.. But, I've never heard of them doing DNS queries to find websites.

While I've not scientifically tested it, I saw something similar with mykindlereviews.com site. It was brand new and all I did was tweet it, and very quickly after that it was indexed by Google. Even better, it started ranking for targeted keywords. It did get some actual links not long after, but I'm pretty sure the very first were nofollowed twitter links. Like I said, non-scientific, but I've also in the past seen what appears to be anchor text from nofollowed comment links seeming to be passed.

When you've been doing this stuff long enough you can almost "feel" these things...that is, what works and what doesn't. I would imagine that if all your links were nofollowed and that's all you ever got, it wouldn't take long for your site to not rank for targetted phrases, but if you keep building up a real online profile, those links do seem to provide a good start.

Google does lots of things to find new pages. Go register a new domain. Just do that, and nothing else. Google's a registrar. They see the domain appear; they index it.

Potentially, if you set up DNS for a subdomain, they might see that. Easy to test. Make a subdomain, nothing else, no link to it, etc. See if it gets picked up.

When you put a link out on the web anywhere, you've made a page public. It's not a good test to be 100% certain it didn't somehow get your page indexed. That's the goal, right, to say that with certainty.

But the bigger issue isn't that the pages got picked up. It's whether they get any link credit from those links. Those are two entirely different issues. Maybe Google did pick up the pages by following those links. That's an interesting thing to see. But the report's not showing if they got link credit.

Jill, remember that those "nofollow" Twitter links go out in a variety of ways where the nofollow attribute gets lost. The official Twitter blog widget, for example, doesn't attach nofolow to links.

And sorry for the name confusion!

Jill, remember that those "nofollow" Twitter links go out in a variety of ways where the nofollow attribute gets lost. The official Twitter blog widget, for example, doesn't attach nofolow to links.

Yep, which is why I'd never tell anyone that Twitter links don't count in Google. Whether it's because they've been repeated elsewhere and do not have nofollow on them or Google does sometimes ignore nofollow (which I think) it doesn't matter. They are all good!Danny, I'd be interested in seeing a site actually get traffic for somewhat competitive keywords just by registering the domain. My site was amazingly getting this kind of traffic with just the Twitter mentions. Was pretty cool, I must say!

Jill, you've got your Twitter feed assigned to your FriendFeed account. That means Ms Googlebot fetches the link's destination in the moment you tweet an (even shortened) URI: [insert some pubsubhubbub gibberish].

I am not much aware how to calculate SEO juice, but this is 100% true that Google follow "No Follow" links. I have actually used it to bring a site on Top-10 on Google.ae for "marriage planner Dubai". Though it remained there for few days, but still it came. And i just added few links of forums and Blogs, 99% of them were No Follow.