Two questions about nofollow

On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.

Vince Samios from the United Kingdom asked:

Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google's search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google's algorithms?

jonaths from Brighton, UK asked:

Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Stuart Condé]

Why is Matt in a toilet?

[Hans Husman]

Cant say that I have looked but I imagine that a lot of says republish Wikipedia. I could see some of them removing nofollow since the links in Wikipedia very often is very good and hence maybe see that they would increase possibility to traffic with especially Google (I remember now something I saw comining Wikipedia pages with data from similar web references).

Maybe such pages would add up to some power with Google even you dont rank each on any position visible.

[Gabriel Hasbun]

Hehe, YouTube decided to disallow links completely.

[jaymarpielago]

Thumbs up. I nomore to say about this video. Its been clearly deliver!

[freegg888]

yes that's true, Google just doesn't like to admit it! I've proven that they count, on my own site.

[agapitoflores001]

Very bright. Good way to stop spammers.

[nervusdm]

The problem is that no one do that.

Nofollow is here, everywhere.

Forums, blogs comments...

If a great user with something like 10 000 messages, post a link in a forum, this is in nofollow. What's the fuck with that ?

[PowderHen]

I think this oversimplifies things. OK, by number, relatively few links use nofollow, but Google never relied on link counts alone; links can carry more weight depending on their context. We can hope that Wikipedia links are on popular pages, are added responsibly, point to good resources, and are well checked. Therefore they carry more weight - hence the appeal to spammers - and there was a greater loss to pagerank when Jimbo forced the use of nofollow across en, against a democratic vote.