REL Nofollow SEO - Dofollow backlinks from pages that are not indexed in Google have zero value, right?

[Poplanu]

Dofollow backlinks from pages that are not indexed in Google have zero value, right?

Context: Looking at a competitor's backlink profile from Ahrefs, and there are many "profile" type of links that are not indexed in Google.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Dofollow backlinks from pages that are not indexed in Google have zero value, right?

Context: Looking at a competitor's backlink profile from Ahrefs, and there are many "profile" type of links that are not indexed in Google.

John Mueller has claimed that Google is pretty much now ignoring all user-generated links. I don't think that that means contextual links like on Medium or something, since there's an editorial process for each blog. But he specifically pointed out Pinterest profile links as an example. Even if you do the business account and get dofollow, they ignore it. I'm sure that goes for forum links and other types.

But I don't agree that noindex pages pass no page rank. I think they absolutely do. John Mueller made a statement once about noindex pages eventually making all links go nofollow (because they aren't crawled) and Gary Illyes corrected him. The logic is that... why would it matter if they "kind of" go nofollow if they didn't pass juice? Also, if they still get crawled from links on your site otherwise, they'll still flow juice through them, which then flows juice through the links on those pages. An example would be noindex-ing all paged pages of a category archive (page/2/ and onward) but still having them linked through the pagination.

 

[Poplanu]

But I don't agree that noindex pages pass no page rank. I think they absolutely do. John Mueller made a statement once about noindex pages eventually making all links go nofollow (because they aren't crawled) and Gary Illyes corrected him. The logic is that... why would it matter if they "kind of" go nofollow if they didn't pass juice? Also, if they still get crawled from links on your site otherwise, they'll still flow juice through them, which then flows juice through the links on those pages.

Haha, I actually found that Mueller video, but not the correction from Illyes!

That "eventually go nofollow" story sounded like some Google bullshit indeed, glad to have that clarified. Because the non-indexed pages (at least some of them) seem to pass juice, from looking at that competitor's profile.

Here's the competitor I'm looking at:

DR: 33
Dofollow RDs: 247
Indexed DF Links: 47
Non-indexed DF links: 200

• Links are mostly comments/fundraisers/events/forum posts/profiles/directories
• The rest is bought guest posts & niche edits - super-obvious ones like TheFrisky etc. And 2-3 links from a failed scholarship campaign.

So here's a breakdown of the 47 indexed links that this guy has:

No way that this alone would give him a DR 33, right? So it seems that links from the non-indexed pages pass juice as well.

 

[Ryuzaki]

No way that this alone would give him a DR 33, right? So it seems that links from the non-indexed pages pass juice as well.

You can't confuse Ahref's DR metric with anything related to Google. Ahref's is definitely counting links from noindex pages. That doesn't mean Google does, though, although I think they do. Just saying to be careful with assuming Ahref's choices are evidence for anything Google actually does.