"nofollow" vs. "no follow"

[LivDetrick]

Does anyone know if it is problematic to have a space between the "no" and the "follow"? I just discovered our CMS has been inserting a space and am trying to understand if it the reason why something that we were trying to keep from being indexed has become indexed.

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hiya, there's an SEO Round Table article from 2009 where Matt Cutts and John Mueller said that Google is looking for an exact match to "nofollow" but that they would consider broadening it to also include the space if they felt the intent is clear enough. I haven't seen anything since and, while it's reasonable to assume Google have broadened the match, I wouldn't count on it.

That said, more importantly, in March this year Google announced a change to how the search engine treats nofollow links. Rather than being treated as a command (as they previously were) they'll now be treated as a strong hint. We know that Googlebot can ignore other hints (like canonicals) so it's quite possible that it is doing the same here. In this case, where you don't want something indexed, I'd rely on noindexing the page itself rather than nofollowing links. Noindexing the page should also help the situation you're in now where the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and you need to get the page removed.

Hope that helps!

[LivDetrick]

Super helpful. Thank you!

[R0bin_L0rd]

Happy to help