I don’t actually think Google completely disregards navigation links. However, after taking a closer look at blekko’s SEO tools, it appears in most cases blekko does and other search engines might too. If it’s that important and easy for a hip new search engine to do, then it makes me wonder EXACTLY how Google and the other major search engines treat navigational and other page links.
Take a look at this detailed analysis to see what I’ve found out about blekko, which probably gives us some insight into how other search engines analyze the links on webpage.
Most navigational links get immediately disregarded or “exlcuded” (header, footer, sidebar, etc.)Links grouped together are usually excludedBlog comments are excluded regardless if they are dofollow linksLooking at the screenshots below you can easily see which links blekko marked as “excluded” and understand what I am talking about.
(Numbers in green are links that blekko didn’t tag as excluded, and red numbers identify links that are marked as excluded. Also, links highlighted in pink have the nofollow attributed assigned to them.)
Anything stand out to you here?
One thing that immediately stood out to me was that blekko seems to exclude most navigational links regardless if they are internal or external links. I don’t believe Google completely excludes navigational links. However, they are likely discounted in some way.
What’s also interesting is that blekko seems to completely ignore the nofollow attribute and 302 redirects. Take a look at links 10 and 12 above. Both of those links are nofollowed, 302 redirected affiliate links and neither of them were excluded.
Now let’s examine how Blekko treats outbound listing links coming from the top 5 directories recommended in the screenshot above.
It appears a listing and backlink from 4 of the top 5 directories I’ve recommended count towards ranking in blekko. JoeAnt is the only one whose listings are excluded – which is interesting, because JoeAnt might be the strictest directory of the bunch. Probably an oversight on their part.
Additionally, I found that “most” listings in the blogs.botw.org directory were excluded, except for listings that didn’t include any additional site links such as: [RSS], [AUDIO], [ATOM], [XML], [VIDEO]. Note: blogs.botw.org is a sub-domain and separate directory from the main directory at botw.org. Listings in the main directory are counted. Probably another oversight because links from both BOTW directories should count – in my opinion, anyway.
I believe the engineers at blekko have manually gone in and allowed links from these directories because other directories I checked had their links excluded. But the great thing is you can always check each directory before you submit to them.
Just keep in mind, blekko, Bing and Google don’t use the exact same algorithms and technology. Google may count links blekko doesn’t and vice versa.
I think most of us assume Google and the major search engines are smart enough to identify, discount or exclude all dofollow blog comment links. However, I thought it would be interesting to see exactly how blekko looks at them since that data is available to us. So I found a site that allows dofollow blog comments and uses the CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and Top Commentators plug-ins.
In this case blekko excluded every link related to blog comments even if they were dofollow links. I also noticed that blekko didn’t find the URLs listed in the drop down option menus on this site.
blekko appears to be extremely strict in regards to which links they count. Navigational links and links that are grouped together are typically ignored while contextual links are NOT marked as “exluded” regardless of their attributes, i.e., NoFollow, 302 redirect, etc..
What have you observed about the way blekko or other search engines looks at navigational links?
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