Hi folks, just letting you know the results after 16 days. Searching with the term "professor van billy winkle" on the top three search engines i get:
- The orphaned page has still not been indexed in Google. All the blog links have been picked up but the landing page is obviously not getting crawled. This would suggest that Google really doesn't follow nofollow links.
- Yahoo on the other hand has indexed the page! They have also picked up most of the blog links, however only 3 out of 5. This would suggest that Yahoo ignores nofollow and does spider the page at the end of the link. The page does not appear for the "professor van billy winkle" search so this would suggest that although yahoo has indexed the page it is ignoring the link text.
- MSN has only picked up 2 out of the 5 links and has not indexed the page. This proves that MSN is slower at indexing and does acknowledge the nofollow attribute.
If anyone else has any conclusions or input then please feel free! But, it seams fairly self-explanatory to me... and if we needed a clearer explanation;
here's what Google say!