Do nofollow Links Pass Link Equity?
Many have wondered whether or not "nofollow" links actually pass any value in spite of the fact that they are not passing PageRank. I know I have.
My personal belief was that having keyword-optimized inbound links pointing to relevant landing pages should/would allow that page to rank higher for that keyword even if the links were nofollow'ed. I decided to run a three month test to try and prove my theory.
I built a landing page around a single keyword that was very odd. I had a simple, optimized title tag, meta's, H1, body copy, etc. I created the page on my ajazi.com domain but DID NOT LINK TO IT from anywhere on the ajazi domain. I did add it to my XML sitemap feed though.
Then, after a few weeks, I added two nofollow'ed links pointing to it from two different third-party websites/blogs with the keyword in the anchor text.
I let Google sit on that for a few weeks as well. All the while checking ranking for that page every week.
I moved around position 50-65 for the keyword every time I checked. I added a few more links after a couple months had passed and actually moved out of the top 100.
Odd.
At the end of the three months I finally added a "live" set of links pointing to the page utilizing anchor text with the keyword in it. The page reached top 10. Grrr...
So as of late October, 2009 it would seem that nofollow means novalue. But my gut still tells me that over time a littany of nofollow'ed links from all these social websites will definitely amount to something. I just don't have the answer as to what.
Oh well...