Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Saurabh Rawat on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/16/2014).

Are nofollow outbound links responsible for ranking?

A nofollow attribute indicates that the link within the anchor tag must not be followed by the search engines.
My question is that nofollow outbound links are responsible for ranking?
I heard this from a seo blog - "Anchor Text – Having the right anchor text will also help your nofollow links improve ranking. " 
Is it true??
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Saurabh Rawat: A nofollow attribute indicates that the link within the anchor tag must not be followed by the search engines.
    My question is that nofollow outbound links are responsible for ranking?
    I heard this from a seo blog - "Anchor Text – Having the right anchor text will also help your nofollow links improve ranking. " ;
    Is it true?
  • Federico Sasso: That's open to debate. We know nofollow-ed links do not pass PageRank (assuming Google is the search engine we are talking about), and G's documentation pages say they drop the link from the link graph.
    I remember statements from G saying they might actually follow such links as a way to discover new content.
    About passing some sort of "juice" impacting ranking: no hard evidence I'm aware of; many of us occasionally experience some circumstantial evidence, nothing sufficient to make a proof.
  • Martino Mosna: nofollow is another way of telling Google and the other search engines "do not count this very link in your link graph map". I still expect them to index the URL and try to crawl it, if it's not blocked by robots.txt
  • I M SEO GUY: According to what we have studied; In the recent change, no follow links are given some weight, and they will be forwarding some juice. Hence will be helping in improving SERP's. ;
  • Saurabh Rawat: My study says - Webmaster shows quality nofollow links and social media links in his tool so I think Google doesn't ignore nofollow links, Google use these links, I don't know where and why. Google may use it for ranking. But I am sure Google doesn't use these links for crawling and indexing.
    Google also says nofollow links on bad quality websites are not responsible for ranking drop that's why almost all seo expert except that Google does't consider nofollow links for ranking. But in the case of quality nofollow links and social media nofollow links the expert may be wrong....

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/16/2014).