December 14, 2008 – Seems that ‘no-follow’ links count in Yahoo! and I suspect the count in Google also. Google does not show them in the normal search parameters but they show in webmaster tools. Even if they don’t pass on page rank juice they probably count towards your search engine rank.

Oct. 21, 2008 – Quick update, I have not had time to check into the results of this experiment. I hope to have some extra time over the Christmas holidays.

August 8, 2008 – Matt Cutts has been quite clear that using the no follow attribute tells Google that any links are ‘advertising’ in nature as opposed to ‘paid links’ designed to manipulate page rank. My thoughts are that if someone wishes to advertise on my sites, I will first review their site to make sure that it meets my standards then I don’t see anything wrong with the search engine algorithm taking that as a vote of popularity. Unfortunately the no-follow attribute has a bit of a tarnished reputation because originally it was used to block the search engines from following untrustworthy links and Google nor Matt Cutts has been very forthcoming in exactly how or if Google counts these links.

This idea/hypothesis has been percolating for a long-time and I finally decided to do some experiments. I placed a post in the local webmaster forum to solicit some help from those that I felt would benefit from being involved in this type of case study. have been pleasantly shocked to find out that many webmaster are interested in helping me. So far there are almost 300 views of the thread and it contains 18 posts, in addition I have received over 20 private messages regarding this study.

I won’t go into too much detail here because I don’t want to influence the outcome of this study. The first term chosen is SEO related and I created a web page with the exact title phrase I will be targeting. The competition for this exact phrase is low, but with enough competitors to gauge the effects of the backlinks. I will build backlinks one-at-a-time and see what effect they have an the SERP’s on Google.com – my assumption is that no-follow links don’t pass on page rank but they do in fact count towards your link popularity. By building a new page with the exact title I am targeting and building backlinks one-at-a-time I should be able to judge whether the vote counts and it will also give me an idea of the value of those votes.