Google nofollow’s itself
Awesome. Nofollow-insane at its best. Check the source of Google’s Webmaster Blog. In HEAD you’ll find an insane meta tag:
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />
Well, that’s one of many examples. Read the support forums. Another case of Google nofollow’ing herself:
Matt thought that all teams understood the syntax and semantics of rel-nofollow. It seems to me that’s not the case. I really can’t blame Googlers applying rel-nofollow or even nofollow/noindex meta tags to everything they get a hand on. It is not understandable. It’s not useable. It’s misleading. It’s confusing. It should get buried asap.
Hat tip to John (JLH’s post).
Update 1: A friendly Googler just told me that a Blogger glitch (pertaining only Google blogs) inserted the crawler-unfriendly meta element, it should be solved soon. I thought this bug was fixed months ago ... if page.isPrivate == true by mistake then insert “<meta content=’NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW’ name=’ROBOTS’ />” … (made up)
Update 2: The ‘noindex,nofollow’ robots meta tag is gone now, and the Webmaster Central Blog got a neat new logo: (I’d add ALT and TITLE text:
alt="Google Webmaster Central Blog - Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index" title="Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index"
)
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Sebastian | Robots Meta Tags, Fun, Webmaster Central, SEO, Microformats, Google, Nofollow | Related posts
I love the schizophrenic application of nofollow they use on the page you showed.
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/about
The link in the paragraph is nofollowed, but one line down I guess it’s okay to have a normal link. It looks more amateurish than most of the stuff that comes in the groups looking for help.
Yep, there are many other examples of rel-nofollow misuse/abuse at Google.
[…] honest users of nearly all platforms you’re using everyday, for example Twitter, Wikipedia, corporate blogs, GoogleGroups … ostensibly to nullify the efforts of a few […]