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March 3, 2010

Google Indexes a URL from a NOFOLLOW Twitter Link-- Proof

Well, earlier today I posted on Twitter the following . . .

Image002

Please note that this URL was NOT indexed in Google at the time. Also note that the URL has been live for months (if not years) and Google had yet to index it.  Furthermore, it currently has no inbound links to the page . . .

What happened?!! Well, Google indexed the URL just as I expected them to do.  They did it in about 1 hour or so according to the time stamp deltas depicted in these two images.

See below:

Image001

Why do you think Google indexed the URL? Do you think it crawled the URL and indexed it from the nofollow link? Do you think they crawled and indexed it because of the number of Google Toolbar users going to the page? Do you think they indexed it because it was a high PageRank domain with a URL they hadn’t discovered before? Or is there some other theory you have? I’d love to know in the comments and via Twitter.

Personally, I think this is pretty big news . . .

Comments (12)

Mar 02, 2010
Scott Duffy said...
NOFOLLOW doesn't mean what you think it means. According to Google, links marked with nofollow "won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results". It does NOT mean Google will not follow it. So you're not passing Google Juice from Twitter to the LA Times. That's it.
Mar 03, 2010
Mark Edmondson said...
I don't think twitter is a good source to use to test "nofollow" indexing - all those scrapers and RSS feeds flying about, its very likely the link will appear someplace else without the tag
Mar 03, 2010
john andrews said...
Google will index any link it finds. That's its job.
Mar 03, 2010
Tad Chef said...
Officially Google doesn't spider and index via nofollow links, see their explanation here
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

On the other hand I've tested it as well and proven that pages only linked on Twitter get indexed:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/google-indexes-twitter-links/

The test took place even before Google gained access to the so called "Twitter firehose".

My explanation is that either they followed a scraper link (but in my case I couldn't find one) or they don't respect the nofollow attribute on Twitter or generally anymore. The twitter mobile version does not use nofollow but it's blocked by robots.txt

Mar 03, 2010
aimClear said...
I'd like to see everywhere else that link appeared right away as a result of the initial publication.

Actually the pathology of how it got indexed is less important that than the fact that it's indexed. We can say that, by whatever mash, it's in the index. To me this is sort of like religion...who cares why we die...we just do :).

Mar 03, 2010
Jenny Stradling said...
I`ve always said Google follows "no follow" links and even indexes them... Just look at del.icio.us.... all no follows and yet constantly showing as indexed backlinks... I have seen it time and time again. Google follows ALL links.
Mar 03, 2010
Ken Lyons said...
Yeah, I leverage the crawl frequency of Twitter and other social sites to get new client sites/pages indexed quickly by Tweeting the link and/or pinging a dozen social sites simultaneously with Ping.fm.

Moral of the story: don't believe everything Google tells you.

Cheers!
Ken

Mar 04, 2010
jstatad said...
Indexing & Following -Yes. Passing on Page Rank - Not likely. I do think they are working on establishing "Trust Ranks" to measure influence of Twitter and Buzz users so they can give some weight to shared links on Twitter & Buzz. This is the case for Real Time Searches. The question is when or if these Trust factors start being used for regular SERPs.
Mar 04, 2010
Mark Jaquith said...
Think of "nofollow" as "nopassinfluence." It doesn't mean they can't follow the link or index what it finds.
Mar 04, 2010
cory huff said...
It very well could be all of your suggestions, yes? Twitter, Toolbar, RSS, high PR parent domain, even citations maybe?

Another sign that testing is more important than reading the experts.

Mar 04, 2010
Trontastic said...
How about we say this... NOFOLLOW doesn't mean sht. Not only have I seen this before, I've also seen what looks to be juice passing through "NOFOLLOW" links from very large sites with mid levels of PR. So if that happens depending on who the referring site is, then not only Google knows exactly what a NOFOLLOW is supposed to be or do.

Brent, did you see if its indexed by the other engines too? Or was it already?

Mar 05, 2010
Lana I. said...
i tested this last night on a page of a site I work for. as of today, the page has not been indexed. i tweeted a full url of a page that has not been crawled. is there some variable to this?

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