A few months ago, I wrote a post about the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

As seems to be the case every few months, the topic has once again resurfaced and it’s clear that many people are still not quite sure how the various search engines treat the tag, as the discussion at the DigitalPoint shows.

Michael at SEO-Blog did some testing, as did Mark Barrera at the Dallas-SEO blog.

To summarise, it appears that:

• Google follows nofollow links but doesn’t index the page
• MSN doesn’t seem to follow or index
• Yahoo! follows and indexes the page.

So if anything at all is clear, it’s that the Search Engines still don’t have any kind of universal way of handling the attribute.

Glad we cleared that up then…