Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://blogallalong.com)
Category: Link Building
Here I do some live tests on both Google and Yahoo to see the difference, and see the interesting information we can retrieve by utilizing the NoFollow adaptation.
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Yahoo and Microsoft both supported the tag at the time is was launched: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
Funny they thank them. However this post clearly shows Yahoo at least does not apply it:
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-google-yahoo-handle-link-condom.html
Yahoo have clear stated (when asked by SEJ) that they still follow for discovery but don't attribute juice.
I actually find Google and Yahoo results fairly similar, though Yahoo tend to place more weight on URL / Title and there are less problems with supplemental results.
Rel="nofollow" never meant "do not follow this link to its destination". Google has changed that behavior a long time after the standardization, it's relatively new that Googlebot does no longer follow nofollow'ed links.
rel-nofollow is defined as "do-not-pass-reputation", so it's within the standard when Yahoo follows these links, indexes the destination, but doesn't weight the link.
http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/how-google-yahoo-handle-the-link-condom/ (read more posts in the nofollow category for details and nofollow horror stories)
The fact that so many folks do not understand the rel-nofollow semantics makes it evil crap.
"The fact that so many folks do not understand the rel-nofollow semantics makes it evil crap."
Sebastian, you are very wise...