Ever since the nofollow attribute was introduced, people have argued inconclusively whether or not Google spiders nofollow links. Everybody has been running around like a dog chasing a racquetball trying to figure out whether or not these links hold any value.

Well ladies and gentlemen, after spending a little time performing a basic experiment; the short answer is YES they do pass authority.

So many gurus are running around telling people that nofollow links are useless. Well my friends, we have proved them WRONG. Not only did my test URL get indexed, it is also listed on the first page of Google. It took about four weeks before the site got indexed off of a mere 5-6 nofollow blog comments and a yahoo answers response.

Also, keep in mind that the keyword I used is the name of my domain and only had 237 other sites with the keyword in their title; in other words not a very competitive term. If you were trying the same thing with ‘Poker’, ‘Ringtones’ or another competitive niche you wouldn’t experience the same results with so few links.

You are probably wondering what the domain was?

http://www.janked.net <– This Link Is Nofollow to keep things in line.

Go ahead, search for janked, that’s right, we are on the first page.

As far as I’m concerned this is 100% conclusive evidence that nofollow links not only tell the engines to index your site, but they also pass some for of authoritative link juice.

What do you think of that fellow SEO gurus?