Do Nofollow Links Count?

Do Nofollow Links Count? (http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/2007/05/do_nofollow_lin.html)

Generally we say that nofollow links don't count, but Ben Fisher (http://www.socialdude.com/) actually found that they do help with ranking based on a small experiment he ran. He did an interesting study where he wrote on the SpiderMan 3 game and then commented on other related blogs that linked back to his SpiderMan 3 post. The unique thing about the link was that it contained the anchor text "piderMan 3" and contained a nofollow, but within a short period of time his site ranked on the first page of Google for piderMan 3 Xbox and other terms.

http://linkbuildingblog.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/07/piderman_3_xbox_google_search_11785.png (http://linkbuildingblog.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/07/piderman_3_xbox_google_search_11785.png)
If you look at the image above it shows that there are 224 results for "piderMan 3 Xbox". This means that it should be fairly easy to rank for the term, but the actual blog post that ranks for the term doesn't have the word piderMan anywhere within the content. The only reason I think it ranks is because the nofollow link contained the anchor text "piderMan".

I am not sure if the way Google looks at nofollows is currently messed up on their end or if they actually do count them, but based on this experiment it seems that they can help with rankings. What do you think?

Google was rather shrewd in how they worded the description of what NoFollow actually does. The "announcement" took two parts. With internal links the discussion was about the crawler knowing not to follow the link because it led to an area that spiders really shouldn't be trying to go - such as a log-in page or content generating page.

When it came to external links, the gist of the message was that the referring site would not be affected by the content on the other side of the link. Surprisingly, the notion that Google would not actually follow that link seems to have been widely assumed, presumably from the discussion on internal link handling, but certainly not on the basis of Google's actual statements on the tag.

What score value the receiving site gets from a NoFollow link - your guess is as good as mine. But it would be no surprise if it was worth something, albeit considerably less than an inbound link without the Nofollow tag.

My only surprise is it took so long for the "gurus" to raise a possibility that existed within the original announcement. And for some more used to the subtleties of "double speak," may even have been suggested.

If that page ranked just because of the anchor text then it would be much harder to get a good ranking. The reasons for this is because if someone hated a site online they would then get lots of links to it having something like "sh*t site" in the anchor text. Now when someone typed that in it would have bought up the site even if they didn't have that word or phrase anywhere in the sites content. So Google then stopped it from doing that. I think they have stopped it or are going to stop it, but I am sure they have actually already done it.